British developer Jon Wheatley let loose an awesome little tool today: Intersquash lets you convert any website into an iPhone site…instantly.

As Jon explains in the video below, it’s a simple 4 step process: enter the RSS feed of your site, enter the site name, upload a home screen icon and place the code provided between the header tags of your website.

That’s it! Your iPhone and iPod Touch visitors will automatically be forwarded to an optimized version of your site. Could this be the best thing ever? No, because the best thing ever is animals in human clothes. But, close.

intersquash demo from jon on Vimeo.

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Source:Mashable!

Don’t blame us if this app never makes it out the door. Don’t tell us it’s “not official”, or that it “will never get approved by the iPhone App Store”….

But do blame us for tempting you with the raw sex appeal of Jake Marsh’s unofficial Revision3 iPhone app, which aims to bring Internet TV to your Jesusphone via the slickest interface known to man. We hope. As Jake explained to Mashable today:

It’s a native iPhone application that will allow people to watch all of Revision3’s content on the go. The goal is to have it be the quintessential be-all-end-all Rev3 content app. Many others have tried and come up short. And since I’m pretty sure Rev3 is locked in a mobile content partnership with some other company, they won’t be releasing a native iPhone app anytime soon. I also want to make it very social, so I want the complete opinions, advice, suggestions and hate mail from the Rev3 community and the internet as a whole so I can make it as perfect as possible right out of the gate. As for release dates and such, the project is about half to three-fourths done.

The man wants feedback, and feedback he shall get! What do you think of Jake’s Revision3 app screenshots below? If, by some stroke of luck, this became available on your iPhone, would you install it?

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Source:Mashable!

Before the current economic crisis landed with a thwack on our plate and ensured that few would escape the beast unscathed, I was really long on peer-to-peer. Totally bullish. And paid P2P - selling content on those peer-to-peer systems that content owners tried to sue out of existence - made sense. I thought, “eventually those Big Media dolts will come around and see the light.” I’m not so sure anymore.

At least not in the short term.

Layoffs

This week we saw half of the staff at BitTorrent Inc getting some serious pink slippage along with the planned termination of the BitTorrent Entertainment Network, an online storefront for copyrighted media. Which tells me that the legit, utopian vision of paid-for P2P downloads is headed for a depression.

Of course, the invention of P2P itself will live on, and mightily so. There’s no reason it wouldn’t, apart from any sudden disconnect of users that might result from a collective credit collapse. (Knock on wood.)

Bearish Content Creators

What’s more, content creators aren’t necessarily so adventurous when crises hit. At least not when they’re trying to secure the most money per viewer possible. That simply can’t be guaranteed through P2P delivery, as opposed to the closed systems of iTunes and Amazon and so forth.

The same goes for the consumer side of the equation. It’s true that BitTorrent rival Vuze recently upgraded its software to version 4.0, and if I’m honest, it’s none too shabby. But consumers tend to flock toward abundance. And I doubt much abundance will greet Vuze anytime soon.

Lack of Content

Just look at iTunes today. It’s full of content from the major television networks. And if you’re to take a similar glance at the top 10-20 unofficial peer-to-peer-based television downloads, you’ll see plenty of names that populate the networks’ prime time schedule. That’s not business friendly to the studios, but you can imagine what Vuze users might want to see in the company’s catalogue, but aren’t available.

2009: Bleak Outlook?

I’ll maintain that P2P as a platform is helpful in many ways and worthwhile for media companies to pursue. But given the current climate in the web media space, it’s hard to imagine a collection like Vuze, or the expired BitTorrent Entertainment Network, making great inroads into the mainstream in 2009 and beyond.

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Glam Media, the content network that mostly targets females, may have acquired a large German content network aimed at females, called Codex Media.

A tipster who has a connection to Codex Media first told TechCrunch about the possible acquisition this morning after receiving a letter from Codex saying “Codex Goes Glam.” On the company’s website, the same statement is used at the top of the page [Google Translation Warning].Source:TechCrunch

Wow. Whoever came up with this new ad for Wario Land: Shake it deserves a raise and a paid vacation to Cancun or something. They’ve taken a basic concept of the game and managed to make it into creative and effective marketing on a platform where even the most humdrum viral campaigns tend to flourish. Screenshots don’t really do it justice, so be sure to check it out yourself.

This is basically an example of viral marketing done right - it’s unexpected, fun, and, in a way, viral simply because it’s an easy way to entertain/impress friends with your web-hunting prowess.Source:TechCrunch

In what will surely make every BitTorrent lover jump for joy, a rough alpha version of uTorrent for the Mac has surfaced on The Pirate Bay and BitTorrent isn’t too happy about it.

uTorrent, which was acquired by BitTorrent in 2006, has always been a Windows-only service. But ever since the acquisition, BitTorrent has promised that uTorrent would be coming to the Mac. For almost two years, Mac users have waited for uTorrent to make an appearance and it finally has — much to the dismay of BitTorrent.

Speaking to TorrentFreak, BitTorrent’s product development VP Simon Morris said the leaked alpha version is not for public use and those that try it out should be warned that it’s still in development.

But it also has one of the worst ratings on Amazon (2,016 out of the 2,216 ratings are one star) because of a concerted campaign by fans protesting its DRM. It has also been downloaded an estimated 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and is well on its way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever.

The past week in technology has been packed with launches. Lots of names coming out of the DEMOfall 08 conference. Google bought itself another property outside the US, called TNC. Facebook finally got forceful with the implementation of its redesign. Apple spread as much buzz about its new iPod lineup as its iTunes 8 software, complete with HD television downloads and Genius music recommendation engine. And the long-awaited release of Spore occurred. The last one of the bunch is what I want to focus on here.

To sum up, the debut of Spore was met with ample applause and plenty of discussion about the Johnny-play-god element of the evolutionary process. All in good fun, of course. The last several days of Spore’s official real-world introduction have also been chock-full of a pretty astonishing level of spite leveled at Electronic Arts for presenting buyers of the $50 title with restrictive DRM. It’s been reported that EA has allowed for a total of 3 unique activations per consumer for use of the product.

The backlash has been so pronounced that, despite the critical acclaim for the gameplay itself, the game ranks among the most lowly reviewed video games listed in the Amazon store. Some 2,016 out of 2,127 reviewers have chosen to give it a single star. The juxtaposition of this figure against its current #4 sales rate is remarkable in and of itself.

This fact is only compounded by Spore’s performance not only on store shelves but the proliferation of illicit downloads on BitTorrent websites. On Friday morning, Andy Greenberg and Mary Jane Irwin of Forbes reported figures released by Big Champagne that estimated some 170,000+ transfers had been made through to Thursday afternoon since it had first been made available on September 2. And if Ernesto at TorrentFreak is at all accurate in stating that far more substantial 500,000 copies have been pirated in total as of the close of the week, the financial impact on its publisher is indeed very pronounced.

The opposition to DRM is of course understandable, as it leaves little or no room for variables such as failed storage drives, damaged installations, and so forth. It is certainly a Draconian limitation in that respect. On the other hand, should there be no restrictions whatsoever? Unlike less interactive forms of media such as music and movies, video game creators have little additional revenue than that delivered through game sales. Musicians commonly go on tour to generate income to reap a profit from their time in the studio. Film producers take to theaters before delivering discs and downloads. Apart from product placement within their respective virtual environments, game developers have their titles and one primary route through which to net the customary returns on investment. So it seems some precaution on the part of the supplier would be sensible.

The question is, how much caution is suitable for today? 5 PCs? 10? Too little, and you threaten to stifle consumer enjoyment. Too much, and you devalue the product. A safe balance must be established. In the case of Spore, the lock seems to have proven too tight. And this brings another point into the fray, albeit very glass-half-full in its premise. Is it possible that purchases of Spore licenses will correlate at least a little with BitTorrent distribution? In other words, might consumers buy the packaged installation, only to place a pirated copy on their machines in order to facilitate reinstalls if/when desired? Would it be too absurd to think so?

I figure the logical answer is no, sales will not follow the line laid out by the peer-to-peer world. EA will either have to rough this challenge with steadfast conviction or ameliorate the protesters with a re-design of its user contract. The latter will prove less damaging. The Amazon reviews, and those published elsewhere, meanwhile, will stay, unless EA can manage to convince a collective retraction, at least for most responses. How that is conducted will be thoroughly complex, but it isn’t an impossibility. Whatever the case, it really must be addressed. I for one imagine the Amazon review system to stand akin to the eBay feedback program in terms of buyer influence. If enough people speak ill of an item, that item will not move shipments so quickly.

Would you buy Spore and pirate it, too? ( surveys)

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The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.

Read the rest of this entry at TechCrunchIT.

(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski).

One might think it a stretch to take a label given to Mussolini by history and place it atop Silvio Berlusconi’s head, but that’s precisely what The Pirate Bay have done. Why for? The Italian government’s organizing of a clean sweep of Italian ISPs to prevent access to the BitTorrent website.

Indeed, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is annoyed, according to TorrentFreak, and is claiming discrimination by fascism. The block put in place by ISPs is said to have been implemented with a formal government request issued Friday. TPB presented a brief explanation on its blog concerning the matter, and is for the moment asking Italian users to redirect their browser to another .org address, dubbed “La Baia.”

Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister between 1994-5, 2001-6, and now 2008 once more, has a particularly strong desire to do away with copyright infringement on the Web. He is the founder and majority owner of Fininvest, a media and finance conglomerate that controls much of the nation’s television market within the Mediaset empire, as well as the film company Medusa.

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Source:Mashable!
Looks like Cox Communications is following in the footsteps of Comcast, having been found to be interfering with file-sharing by blocking its customers’ Internet connections. A study based on research by The Associated Press and Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems found that about 54% of Cox users were blocked […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Cox Blockers: Keeping Torrent Users from Sharing Files”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/cox-blocks-interne/” });