According to the NYTimes, Amazon will today launch Video on Demand - a new online video store, containing movies and TV shows.

What’s the big difference between this video store and most other online video stores? Streaming. When you order a show on Amazon’s new service, you can start watching immediately, just how it works on IPTV. Amazon’s own Unbox or Apple’s iTunes can’t do that, because you have to wait out the download before you start watching. Amazon Video on Demand will feature 40,000 titles at opening.

For those less computer-savvy users who like to do everything on their TV, there’s an option; Sony Bravia Internet Video link, which will bring the videos directly to your Sony TV. However, it’s an extra 300 bucks which not everyone will be willing to dish out. Some new models will have the functionality built-in, though, reducing the extra cost.

This is not a revolutionary step in any way; it’s just Amazon’s estimate that broadband penetration is high enough that such a move makes sense. It probably won’t even be making them any money at first, but the race for online video on demand is on with healthy competition from Google, Netflix and others, and there’s no time to waste.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Amazon’s CreateSpace Now Offers Books On DemandAmazon, Penguin & HP Search for Next Top AuthorAmazon Video Reviews Now LiveAmazon Acquires Brilliance Audio To Widen SelectionAOL and Amazon Join Up For Video SalesAmazon Software Downloads To Soon Expand To Games?Network.com - Sun Provides Grid Computing for $1/CPU-hour

Source:Mashable!

As a content distributor, Mochila is fully aware of the fact that it needs to stay on top of current events in order to ensure that its content syndication participants have access to the most relevant content being distributed on the Web.

A new deal with BarelyPolitical, the network behind the Obama Girl, means that Mochila clients can provide BarelyPolitical’s content on their sites, as Mochila digs deeper into the political pool in order to satisfy the world’s insatiable appetite for political news–and entertainment. In addition to BarelyPolitical content, Mochila will also be providing content from other political sites including AntiWar, Newsmeat, RawStory, RealClearPolitics, TalkingPointsMemo and TalkLeft.

These deals really help broaden the direct access to content through Mochila, and extend more ways in which content producers can syndicate their content across the Web. BarelyPolitical, in particular, has been signing a number of distribution deals in order to push its content as far as possible, and given BarelyPolitical’s popularity, the garnering of so many partnerships seems to have been a successful tactic.

But to kick things off with the new partnership between Mochila and BarelyPolitical, the two companies will be promoting online political coverage of the 2008 presidential elections at NetRoots Nation in Austin, a 3-day event that begins today. While Obama Girl clearly has a political objective, Mochila will merely be spreading the word about its platform for connecting content producers with site publishers. “We’re here to help by providing free, ad-supported political content from great brands across the spectrum,” Mochila CEO Keith McAllister says.

The target is the Gen Y crowd, which consists of avid Internet users and is of the voting age. So as a gap-bridging tool for providing site publishers an ability to leverage a highly active and growing political interest, Mochila is doing its part to present some of the best content that’s available for such distribution across the Web.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Mochila Gets Funding and a Client in BeloMochila Adds Citizen Image to its RepertoireMochila Partners with Clickability for Distribution ExpansionMochila Teams with BIM for Content DistributionMochila Signs On American Media, Inc. to Provide Content to Web PublishersMochila Teams Up with Gigya for Widget Distribution of ContentObama Girl Gets a New Home at Next New Networks

Mochila, the NY-based content syndication has signed a deal with Guardian News & Media to become a premier content syndication partner in the Mochila content marketplace. The Guardian is based in the U.K. This deal marks Mochila’s first partnership outside the U.S. and will help open the content marketplace to a new set of potential customers, both on the buy and the publisher side. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mochila is a media marketplace that brings together publishers and content buyers. Their tagline is: "Buy. Sell. Earn." These distribution deals make Mochila more attractive for content publishers.

Mochila recently demo’ed their content marketplace and I’ve embedded the video below.

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A few months ago, I started work on ArmchairGM’s New York Mets entry. My own knowledge stems back only until about 1983, but as one could imagine, the Web is a treasure trove of information, including stories about the early Mets teams. A quick search yielded this result — an entry from an old Geocities site. “Dave’s Mets Page”, in fact.

It immediately occurred to me that “Dave” would be a great contributor to ArmchairGM. After all, he had written excellent historical sports content to the point where I was able to base my writing almost exclusively off his. Scrolling down on his page, I found his email address, and sent him an email. It bounced.

Dave’s page admits that it was last updated on May 15, 1999. A quick look at his yearly summaries buttresses this fact, as the last summary written is 1998. And there’s one other interesting thing on Dave’s page: a copyright notice.

So here I have:

• Content I want to use
• An author who I can’t (easily) locate
• A clear indicator that the content is unavailable without permission.

That last bullet is, legally, meaningless, but anecdotally important. Web culture wrongly tends to assume that, in absence of a copyright notice or the equivalent, all content is available so long as due attribution is given. In this case, even that assumption is clearly false. Unless I have the author’s permission, I cannot use the content. And getting permission is, at best, difficult, as the author’s email address is inactive. (As it turns out, I probably could track the guy down. But let’s assume he had a more common last name; say, like, “Lewis.”)

The side effect of all this? Even if I were willing to pay for rights, I cannot, because there is no one to which I can write the check. In a very real sense, the content is held captive by an absent rights-owner, and the cost of me either (a) tracking down the rights-owner or (b) ignoring his rights and re-publishing in violation thereof probably exceed the value of the content altogether. Per a press release from Senator Pat Leahy, "Potential users of orphan works often fail to display or use such works out of concern that they may be found liable for statutory damages, amounting to as much as $150,000."

If you find this silly, rest assured you are not alone. In 2005-06, the U.S. Copyright Office studied the issue — called “orphan works” — and released its report in early 2006. Since then? A whole lot of nothing. A few bills and hearings in Congress, but no final action. Senator Leahy introduced his bill only last months, so there is some hope there, but call me skeptical regarding its odds of passage.

Even if it does pass, it only solves half the problem — that is, it removes liability from those who use “orphan” works and the rights-holder appears, but it does not remove the burdensome cost of seeking out the rights-holder. Indeed, the bill would require the republisher to “perform and document a good faith – but ultimately unsuccessful – search for the owner of the copyright in the work being used prior to such use.” And even then, “[i]f the owner later emerges and provides notice of infringement to the user, the user must negotiate reasonable compensation in good faith and render any such compensation agreed upon in a timely fashion.” Basically:

• I spend time finding some content I want to use
• I can’t locate the author easily, so
• I have to spend time and/or money to locate the author or risk significant statutory damages, and
• If the author emerges, the author has significant negotiating leverage that he’d not have held if he were easily locatable in the first place.

Wow! The words “perverse incentives” pop into mind. So do the words “not really a solution, Senator Leahy.”

A Better Idea: The Duty to Maintain

In the digital age, with content available over the Web, why put all the burden on the subsequent user of the content? Instead, let’s shift the burden on the rights-holder to, in the very least, maintain his content and/or contact information. Here are my givens and, therefore, the rubric for the idea:

• It is unreasonable to require that the author divulge his or her identity or contact information in order to receive copyright in the work

I would be surprised if there is anything controversial about that. Necessarily, the author would need to reveal his or her identity in order to enforce the rights associated with the work, but that’s a distinct question.

The corollary to that given is that a work is not considered an orphan merely because it, in the words of Leahy’s bill, “lacks identifying information pertaining to its owner[.]” That seems self-evident; otherwise, anything anonymous or even accidentally unsigned would be immediately available for republication. In short, without this tenet, copyright is eviscerated to a meaningful degree in many cases where it should not.

• If the author is unknown or unreachable, a certain amount of time must pass before the work is to be considered an orphan.

To a large degree, that is a restatement of the bullet item preceding. Using my Mets history example, though, here’s a distinction — let’s say that today were May 30, 1999, and I sent the same email to the same juno.com email address, and, again, the email bounced. The author is unreachable, sure, but he worked on the content in question (or some related content thereto) just 15 days prior. Would it be acceptable for me to declare the work and orphan and republish it? Hardly.

In the context of blogging, this point is even more meaningful. Imagine an anonymous blogger who posts once every three days. He goes on vacation for two weeks. His last post should, by no means, become succeptible to re-use as an orphan. On the other hand, say he stops blogging for two years. Different result? I think so. Similarly, apply the same logic to a known-but-unreachable blogger — in the case of a two week vacation, it’s unfair to claim that the work is an orphan, but in the case of a two year hiatus, it’s fair game.

That seems right to me. The conclusion, then: If an author is unknown and/or unreachable, and he fails to maintain his work, his works are considered orphans, and thereby are available for use by third parties without prior permission.

And, per the problem that Senator Leahy’s bill aims to address, those works should be available for use by third parties. Maintenance can be something as simple as writing an occasional blog post or, in the case of Dave’s Mets Page, changing the date to say “Last updated January 1, 2008?, or something like that. (In this case, pleas bear in mind that I am really only discussing compilations of Web-based content, such as blogs and other continually growing websites. It’d be more difficult, by leaps and bounds, to continually “maintain” a photograph, for example.) Or even more simply? Make sure you, the author, provide an easy and reliable way for others to contact you. You know, like keeping your email address current.

The question then becomes: How do we effectively put the burden on the rights-holder? My solution: a time-lapse Creative Commons license. For the first n months of unmaintained, anonymous work, the copyright holder would retain all rights. Another n months after that, the content becomes available via a non-commercial, no derivative works (NC-ND) license. And another n months after that, the content becomes available under a pure attribution license — basically, a link back. Perfectly tailored for the Web, as the default way to give attribution is via a hyperlink back to the source of the content. And for our purposes, it meets the initial goal, by shifting the burden onto the original author and not onto the subsequent user.

Could this be done legislatively? Probably, although the details would be murky and, again, I am skeptical that Congress will ever act on Leahy’s proposal, let alone my admittedly more controversial one. I would not consider Congressional action to be a realistic goal here, or, for that matter, in regard to copyright reform in any meaningful sense.

However, this rubric could be achieved socially. Already, many authors choose, of their own accord, to use “copyleft” licenses such as the Creative Commons menu or the GNU Free Documentation License (used by Wikipedia, for famous example). I believe that many authors who do not subscribe to the copyleft dogma would find the time-lapse Creative Commons licensing scheme less controversial, as so long as they maintain either (a) the content itself or (b) their contact information, the copyleft scheme will never come into play. As the risk of losing rights to one’s work only comes from sloth, it would be very hard for an author to socially defend their refusal to adopt this time-lapse license. In short, what appears controversial legislatively should be less so socially — and an effective solution to Web-based orphaned works.

Sure, there are details that need resolution, such as how the hypothetical license would define “maintain,” but those definitions are more for edge cases than the core problem set caused by orphan works. One hopes that the eventual solution for orphan works will include a duty on behalf of the rights-holder to maintain their work — or allow for licensing which permits re-use.

Dan Lewis is an graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and of Tufts University. He is a co-founder of ArmchairGM.com and now works at Wikia.

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White label multimedia search provider Pixsy will announce a partnership with visual search engine Ditto on Thursday. Ditto enables people to navigate the Web through pictures. Under the terms of the agreement, Ditto will utilize Pixsy’s advanced media search platform to power consumer image search on destination search property Ditto.com and across its network of partners and affiliates.

Pixsy explains that their white label search service offers sites the ability to run branded video and image search which can drive additional pageviews and potential advertising inventory to create a higher ROI. Last week Pixsy announced a partnership with National Lampoon.

We’ve also learned that Pixsy CEO Chase Norlin will present at the Goldman Sachs Global Internet Conference next week in Las Vegas.

Source:CenterNetworks

Content marketplace Mochila presented their application at tonight’s NY Tech Meetup. We’ve written about Mochila a number of times before including our interview with the CEO and CMO. Mochila is a media marketplace that brings together publishers and content buyers. Their tagline is: "Buy. Sell. Earn." They offer a variety of top grade content publishers with all types of media including video, audio, image and text.

Mochila also announced a new video player this morning.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Web 2.0 Invites for January 2nd, 2008Web 2.0 Invites for February 17th, 2008Web 2.0 Invites for March 4th, 2008Web 2.0 Invites for March 9th, 2008Web 2.0 Invites for […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Web 2.0 Invites for May 13th, 2008″, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/13/web-20-invites-for-may-13th-2008/” });

Source:Mashable!
The Web 2.0 Marketplace is a place to list Web 2.0 and “New Media” websites for sale, job offers, consulting services, Facebook development services and more.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Zune Marketplace to Accept Podcast SubmissionsWeb 2.0 Marketplace Listings for December 13th, 2007Web 2.0 Marketplace: Your Feedback PleaseFacebook Marketplace: WRONG! Not […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for May 13th, 2008″, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/13/web-20-marketplace-listings-for-may-13th-2008/” });

Source:Mashable!
Green tech is something that’s becoming more and more mainstream, thanks to television programs, Al Gore, and the upcoming presidential election. And a slew of web-based services are helping to form communities around green lifestyle initiatives, taking a grass roots approach to the permutation of such efforts that can one day bring about great […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “How Investors Feel About Green Tech, and How You Feel About Investors”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/13/amigreenornot-sf-green-tech/” });

Source:Mashable!
Mochila isn’t announcing a new partner (per say), but the new player has kicked in a lot more functionality. This new player, version 2.0, offers multiple related videos within the same player, making its content availability far broader and more valuable to site publishers, readers, and advertisers alike. This brings in some traditional […]SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Mochila and Innovation: New Video Player and Comments on Reuters API”, url: “http://mashable.com/2008/05/13/mochila-new-video-playe/” });

NY-based Mochila is announcing a new partnership today with Pringo. Pringo is a white-labeled social networking provider similar to other NY-based companies KickApps and Magnify.net. Pringo customers will have the ability to add Mochila content syndication into their social networks and benefit from a revenue share. Pringo customers will also be able to syndicate their content to the 3500+ publishers in the Mochila platform.

Mochila has continued to increase their distribution with deals nearly every month similar to the one today. Check out my interview with the Mochila team along with their nextNYers video interview.

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There has recently been a lot of discussion in the venture community about the declining cost of starting an IT company. Lots of very smart and thoughtful VCs have written about this topic. Here’s a link to one popular article on the subject.  However, there seem to be two contradicting viewpoints in the market.  One that arguing that traditional early-stage VC will die out, another that indicates that the early-stage VC market is improving.  This is my attempt to rationalize the two perspectives.

Underlying Causes
While I think the various pundits have identified the presence of companies that do exemplify lower capital needs, there seems to be limited exploration into all the trends that are driving this change.

Two underlying causes of this phenomenon are the declining cost of developing technologies and acquiring customers.

The cost of developing technologies has declined, as:

• Software design tools have become more advanced,
• Hardware and storage costs have decreased, and
• Infrastructure companies (e.g., hosting services) have realized increasing scale, reducing costs and improving quality.

The cost of acquiring customers has also declined, as:

• Web 2.0 services (e.g., Facebook, del.ico.us) have made it easier for customers to recommend products, and
• Internet-based advertising channels have become more targeted, track-able and dependable.

Who This Affects
While most software and Internet companies benefit from the declining infrastructure costs, not all business models equally benefit from the changing marketing costs. Specifically, models leveraging the Internet as their primary channel for customer acquisition benefit more from this trend than models which require sales personnel, as is common for companies selling to enterprises.

Anecdotal Evidence
Before I continue, I want to point out that my conclusions about the situation and the conclusions drawn by others appear to be based on anecdotal evidence. So, take my perspective with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I hope this viewpoint will provide another chapter in the on-going dialogue on this matter.

A Potentially Superficial Contradiction
I have spoken to a handful of other VCs about this matter recently and there seems to be some consensus that there has been no decline in the number of IT ventures that require substantial capital. Put another way, VCs are still seeing lots of companies seeking full Series A, B and C rounds. These companies need to purchase considerable advertising inventory, employ sophisticated staff to perform critical functions and build a strong business development team in order to secure partnerships with other companies. Those expenses accumulate, creating a need for multi-million dollar investments.

Furthermore, it seems likely that the need for capital is here to stay. Marketing costs are likely to increase as ad dollars continue to migrate to the web. Wages also continue to rise and we have yet to replace business development executives with software. So long as these cost centers exist there will be a need for venture capital.

On the surface, this conclusion seems to contradict the vision of pundits who expect the need for traditional levels of capital infusion ($2-5MM Series A rounds) to disappear over time.

While the evidence that I have heard for both sides of this trend to date has been anecdotal, both arguments seem reasonable and compelling. As a result, I began to wonder whether the trends seen by both camps are correct. I asked myself, “Do these trends have to be mutually exclusive? Is this a zero sum game?”

The Longtail of Venture: An Attempt to Rationalize
In an attempt to rationalize how the venture market could have both a consistent number of startups with traditional capital requirements and a host of new startups with less robust capital needs, I developed a hypothesis on the matter that appears to support both trends. I believe that companies that do not need traditional venture capital investments make up the longtail of venture.  For simplicity, I am going to refer to these as the venturetail going forward. The fact the venturetail exists does not implicitly mean that all companies need less capital. It is possible that venturetail companies are being started in addition to companies that have traditional capital requirements.

[Diagram]

My intuition tells me that there are two reasons why lower costs lead to more companies being started. First, some of the Internet companies being launched may not have been profitable endeavors when startup costs were higher; with lower costs more business models are economically viable. Second, the risk associated with these ventures has declined, enabling entrepreneurs who don’t want to ’stake it all’ the opportunity to pursue a startup in their free time or without betting the house.

The venturetail represents, in my hypothesis, a new class of companies that is comprised of both:

• Companies that would have been pursued when costs were higher but are now benefiting from substantially reduced costs, and
• Companies that were not economically viable in past (costs were too high to generate a profit).

If this intuition is correct it supports the idea that venturetail companies have not displaced the traditional companies, rather, the venturetail companies are being launched in addition to traditional startups.

In sum, it seems that the presence of companies that require less capital doesn’t seem to negate the need for venture capital. Rather, it’s possible that a new class of startups has emerged that will be served by a different venture model. 

[Diagram]

It’s unclear exactly how this market will evolve.  However, my hope is that this hypothesis will help to rationalize some of the latest market trends.

This column was provided by Mark Davis. Mark is the author of Get Venture, a column designed to help entrepreneurs raise venture capital.  In addition to his column, Mark is active in the venture community as an entrepreneur, advisor and venture capitalist.  He currently works at DFJ Gotham Ventures, a leading early-stage IT venture capital fund based in NYC.  Before entering the venture space he advised Fortune 1000 and private equity clients on the strategic and financial attractiveness of acquisition targets at both Bain & Company and KPMG LLP. Mark earned his B.A. in Economics with a minor in History at Duke University and is pursuing his MBA at Columbia Business School, where he is the Early Stage President of the Private Equity and Venture Capital Club and the Founder of the Columbia Venture Community . 

Source:CenterNetworks -

Reports from Andy Beard, Problogger and a variety of other sites indicate that Google is shuffling their Pagerank scores. While some have believed Pagerank to be dead, many sites and text link companies use it as a basis for pricing their ads. The big sites hit were Engadget (PR7 to 5), Problogger (PR6 to 4) and Copyblogger (PR6 to 4). Brian Clark has a funny chat about the change which is worth a read. Brian believes that his drop is not due to selling links (he has never done so) but rather due to a report he published about not relying on Google as a business model.

For sites that have established reputations and traffic bases, a movement in their Pagerank probably won’t affect them much. A loyal visitor to Engadget isn’t moving to Gizmodo because of the drop.

If the SEOs believe that Google is "attacking" them, will they begin to leave? And if they do leave, will Google feel an earnings hit? Will ad dollars from the SEOs move to Yahoo, Ask, etc?

Source:CenterNetworks -

NY-based Mochila is announcing a new partnership with Gigya, the emerging widget distribution and tracking network.  Mochila will deploy Gigya’s Wildfire technology to its extensive network of buyers and sellers including content publishers of all sizes, from long-tail blogs to large media companies.

Mochila is a content mediaplace and they continue to expand their distribution network signing deals with Belo and Citizen Image over the past month. For Mochila to be successful, distribution is key and Gigya is an excellent choice as their widget partnerships run from Cnet to RockYou to Metacafe. 

“Mochila is a breakthrough syndication model for the publishing world and we’re thrilled to be able to tap into Gigya’s technology to help drive a new dynamic for the exchange of all types of content,” said Benjamin Chen, chairman and CTO of Mochila. “By partnering with Gigya, we can build upon the ways in which we help our publisher members syndicate quality content that otherwise becomes trapped and siloed. We’re equally excited that Gigya can also supply us with the opportunity to incrementally monetize this additional distribution.”

Check out my interview with the Mochila executive team and the press release on Silicon Alley Insider.

The latest numbers have been published by comScore for July-August 2007 Internet traffic in the U.K. Facebook is the fastest growing site during the period with a growth rate of 18.3% to 9 million uniques. Other sites with over 10% growth during the period include: Premiumtv.co.uk, Disney Online, WordPress, News International, Shopzilla.com Sites and British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB).

In the top 10 overall properties in the U.K., the Time Warner Network was the biggest traffic loser at -4.1% and Amazon Sites the big winner with a growth of 6.3%. The full top 10 list is included below.

From comScore: "The site (Facebook) has experienced a dramatic 2,167 percent growth within the U.K. since September 2006, when it made the decision to open up registration to the general public, a change from the previous policy requiring a valid email address from a university or a selected group of secondary schools and businesses. During the same period, traffic to the site has increased strongly across Europe, where it has grown by 2,446 percent to reach 13.2 million unique visitors."

Source:CenterNetworks

Mochila, the NY-based content syndication company we interviewed last month has signed another distribution deal, this time with Citizen Image. This comes after deals in September with Reuters and Belo. We know distribution for any content network is key and the Mochila team is following-through with their promise of creating a fully distributed network.

Citizen Image is an image agency that professionally represents photographic and video content of citizen photojournalists to editorial outlets around the world. As a photographer you can sell your images and it has been a very popular service for individuals in consumer journalism.

“Mochila provides our citizen photojournalists not only another easy way to profit from their creativity but also a means to share their work with a broader range of audiences,” said Joe Bransom, president of Citizen Image. “There is a growing demand for image content and an untapped source of photographers at various skill levels, and the Mochila media marketplace meets this need.”

“With the addition of Citizen Image as a content provider and growing importance of user-generated content, Mochila continues to serve as the prime destination for web-based and offline publishers of any size to acquire content for their sites à la carte and on-demand,” said Keith McAllister, CEO of Mochila.  “This serves as a tremendous step towards the growth of our photo library and is indicative of the demand for all forms of content, professional and user generated.  We feel that this latest relationship will continue to level the playing field for publishers of all sizes and enhance the richness and growth of the Mochila marketplace.”