mayorscupballoonrace.com

The TechCrunch judging panel liked this service, and also noted that Adgregate Markets could be used to sell products on a site that’s about the products themselves — in other words, as a sales engine on a commerce site, moreso than an advertising platform.

AdRocket is an advertising system that pushes ads through e-mail status updates (”BACN”) and RSS feeds. The system takes info that’s going into the e-mail and uses it to help target advertising.

“There’s no spam,” the presenter says. My take: Not until you ad advertising to the e-mails. Then it’s an open question. But nonetheless, this is smart business. Most people get regular e-mail from social networks and content sites that don’t have smart — if any — advertising in them. Might as well plaster those transmissions with ad messages, right?

First up was ByBurt’s Copybox. It’s a scripting language for advertising text. Based on where a user is, the weather where they are, and other variables, it adjusts the text in the ad and pushes it into ActionScript (Flash). Could lead to some scary ads that appear almost clairvoyant. I also predict some great ad text bloopers.

Adgregate Markets makes online ads into fully-functioning stores. Basically it’s a widget platform. The pitch is that, currently, users don’t buy online goods from ads because they don’t want to leave the site they are on. Ok, but I am not convinced that squeezing transaction functions into a widget is going to improve sales. Except for low-cost impulse purchases. Maybe that’s enough for this business.

The last block of companies at TechCrunch50 on Monday included three advertising startups. All were focused on making ads more interactive or targeted.

Get the full lowdown on the night’s proceedings from Katie Couric and the CBS News team:

With Thursday night’s finale at the Republican National Convention, the preliminaries of the 2008 presidential contest are over and done with–on to the general election in November.

Watch CBS Videos Online

The centerpiece of the Republican event Thursday in St. Paul, Minn., was the acceptance speech by nominee John McCain. The senator from Arizona offered up his vision for what the country can expect if he and running mate Sarah Palin are sworn into office in January.

In order to get paid and allow their images to be used, Flickr members must sign a Getty Images contributor contract, which stipulates that the photographer is the owner, and has any necessary model releases and originals. It also outlines the various rates based on size and intended commercial usage.

Those rates, not yet available, are likely to follow some of Getty’s standard rates. As part of the deal, the only transaction is being shared directly between the photographer and Getty, meaning Yahoo will not be getting a share of that fee. According to Yahoo’s rep, “Getty and Flickr have a separate business relationship.”

Update: Changes have been made to this article since it first posted regarding the link to the Getty purchase pages on Flickr as well as the nature of the business partnership between Getty Images and Yahoo.

Flickr members interested in getting their images featured in the special Getty gallery will have to simply wait to be contacted. Otherwise, Getty and Flickr are encouraging aspiring photographers to post their content on the Getty-owned iStockphoto, which also happens to have been a hotbed for Flickr photos in the past.

The Yahoo-owned photo-hosting community will be a new resource for Getty, which can now contact Flickr members directly through the site and ask them if they want to share one or more of their images for use in a special Flickr-branded Getty collection.

Flickr on Tuesday entered a partnership with Getty Images to offer its users a way to potentially make money off their photography.

The move is a special deal for Flickr, which currently does not allow for commercial transactions on the site outside of using partners for services such as photo printing. It’s long been expected that Flickr would get around to implementing a system like this, if only to take advantage of the size of its collection, which averages thousands of user uploads every minute.

Flickr-hosted images that have been chosen to be included in the new collection will get a special link to the Getty page where they can purchase a license to use the shot.

The House of Representatives is set to vote Sunday on the Webcaster Settlement Act, which would allow Web radio stations to negotiate with the music industry for a royalty rate lower than what Congress mandated last year.

Proponents of Web radio stations are predicting a very close vote in Congress on a bill that they paint as life or death.

Asked which way Congress was leaning, Pandora founder Tim Westergren said it is too close to call.

Because the bill is being considered under a suspension of rules, it will require a two-thirds majority to pass.

Companies like Pandora are seeking a reduced rate and say that they simply cannot afford to keep operating with the higher rate.

Update at 5:50 p.m. PDT: The House actually did weigh in on the bill on Saturday, passing it unanimously by a voice vote.

“NAB is gunning full bore to kill the bill,” Westergren said. “It’s become a straight up battle between NAB lobbying might and constituents. Calls from listeners have been raining in since last night. (It’s) touch and go.”

The bill was scheduled to go to the House floor Saturday morning but was postponed twice. Meanwhile, the National Association of Broadcasters, which opposes the bill, was also using the extra time to sway lawmakers.

(Credit:
CNET News)

The outage started at 8:48 p.m. PDT Tuesday, according to Microsoft. It followed an earlier scheduled maintenance to both the Zune Marketplace and Xbox Live services that ran through the night Sunday and into Monday.

An unplanned outage hit Microsoft’s
Xbox Live service starting Tuesday night, leaving online gamers unable to connect.

A Microsoft representative said that outages, at least intermittent ones, lasted until 1 p.m. PT (initially they said 2:30). Microsoft declined to offer any further information on the cause of the outage.

Microsoft said the outage was due to an unexpected issue following the maintenance work. Visitors to Microsoft’s Xbox Live support page have been offered the following status update.

Visitors to the Xbox Live support page were offered the following message Wednesday.

At least for me, the
Zune service appears to be working fine. I’ll have more details on the Xbox outage once I get more from Microsoft.

“Users will not be able to connect or log into Xbox Live,” Microsoft said. “We are aware of the problem and working to resolve the issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Update, 3:05 PT: Microsoft said Wednesday afternoon that the service is back up.
“Up and running,” Microsoft said. “Users may experience intermittent issues posting TrueSkill statistics on Halo3. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Bradford, who left Microsoft in March, will occupy the newly created role of senior vice president for U.S. revenue and market development. In this newly crafted position, Bradford will oversee sales, market development, small business, and Yahoo’s HotJobs site, reporting to Yahoo U.S. chief Hilary Schneider.

Former MSN executive Joanne Bradford has landed at Yahoo, following a brief stint at Los Angeles-based ad agency SpotRunner.

In the same press release announcing Bradford’s hire, Yahoo noted that U.S. sales chief David Karnstedt will leave as of September 16. Yahoo said Karnstedt had resigned earlier this summer but had been working with Schneider to “ensure a seamless transition.” Karnstedt will take up a spot as executive-in-residence at a venture capital firm, Yahoo said.

Joanne Bradford

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

The Dream’s $200 price tag also hits the smartphone sweet spot for cost. T-Mobile is already selling both the BlackBerry 8820 and BlackBerry Curve for $199 with a two-year contract. And Apple and AT&T are offering the iPhone 3G for $200 with a two-year contract.

Open-source software is another example. The Android software, millions of lines of code that will become open-source software with the release of the first phone, employs some components familiar to the computing industry and some new ones. It employs Linux at its lowest levels to communicate with hardware, but applications running on the system are written in the Java programming language. Java is common in mobile phones, but Google diverged from the mainstream phone industry by creating its own Java foundation, called Dalvik, for running the programs.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

“Look at Japan, (where) we have far more usage of mobile Web. It’s similar with the iPhone,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin in a meeting with reporters last week. “If the Internet is widely available, that’s good for us.”

T-Mobile already has a decent portfolio of smartphones, including the BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry Curve, and BlackBerry 8820. It also sells two other HTC smartphones that use Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system, the T-Mobile Dash and T-Mobile Wing. But as the carrier rolls out its new 3G network, it needs a flagship device that will give consumers, who might be tempted to buy an iPhone for AT&T’s network, a reason to buy a phone on T-Mobile’s network.

There will be plenty of hullabaloo on Tuesday when T-Mobile unveils the first phone powered by Google’s Android operating system. But the event is only the beginning of a long effort to rewrite the rules of the mobile communications industry.

HTC and T-Mobile seem to have gone the smartphone route in developing the Dream, which some are calling G1. So far, neither T-Mobile nor HTC has revealed details about the new phone. But rumored specifications for the device and pictures on various blogs suggest it’s chock-full of bells and whistles to help it compete in the smartphone market against devices like Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.

New rules
Android is an attempt to bring some of the ways of the computing industry to the mobile phone world.

The HTC Dream is T-Mobile’s iPhone slayer, or so the company hopes. Because the software has been developed by glamorous Google there are a lot of expectations. And some believe that Android could also be a game-changer, just like the iPhone before it.

The iPhone set the bar for what customers should expect from a smartphone. Apple then raised the bar this summer with the iPhone 3G and a new App Store that allows people to buy and download thousands of applications.

In June, just a few weeks before the iPhone 3G went on sale, Sprint Nextel launched the Samsung Instinct, a touch-screen 3G smartphone designed to give iPhone a run for its money.

Andy Rubin, head of Google's Android project.

Bruggeman, though, doesn’t see Google’s crosshairs painted on Apple’s back.

Wind River is contributing code of its own as part of its Android support business. Its customers’ second-generation Android phones will ship in the first half of 2009, Bruggeman said, and “There’s a good chance we’ll make first quarter.” He called the Dream a good start, but promised better power management, performance, usability, and features for the sequels.

But Google’s advertising business is a money factory, and the company has shown it has patience to invest that money in key projects. So even if the first-generation Android phones don’t entice people to line up around the block, competitors who develop mainstream phone operating systems such as Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile doubtless are taking heed.

The phone, a somewhat chunky model called Dream built by HTC, is expected to cost about $200 from T-Mobile and go on sale in October. Until other partners in the Google-spawned, 34-member Open Handset Alliance bring their Android products to market, this small piece of electronics will shoulder a lot of ambitions.

High hopes
But the big question is whether the Dream can live up to expectations.

Like Apple, Google plans a central site to distribute and sell applications. In August, it announced plans for the Android Market, an online center where people can find, buy, download, and rate applications and other content for Android phones. Initially, the site will only support distribution for free applications. An update later will handle different versions of applications, support different profiles of Android phones, and include analytics to help developers track adoption, Google has said.

For Google, Android is a tool to spread Internet-savvy phones far and wide. People with powerful networked phones use the Internet much more, and Google wants to be the top company supplying the information they demand online.

What’s not yet clear is how well Android phones will fare in the marketplace. Google’s software is untested, and there are plenty of competitors in the mobile phone market.

For example, taking a page from Microsoft’s playbook, Google is trying to enlist countless programmers in its Android charge, relying on them to build applications for the phone. While the mobile phone business hasn’t made it easy to add new applications to phones, Google wants to reverse this and bring more of the openness of PCs to the phone market.

“If you’re going to be an Open Handset Alliance carrier, you can’t lock it down,” said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River Systems, a Google ally that helps phone makers build and customize Android for their phone hardware.

For T-Mobile, an Android phone could bring some Google buzz to the scrappy carrier, helping match what AT&T got from Apple’s
iPhone. It also could potentially persuade customers T-Mobile’s new 3G network is worth paying give T-Mobile new revenue from online application sales.

This post was co-written by staff writer Marguerite Reardon.

Since the iPhone was first launched in 2007 exclusively on AT&T’s network, wireless operators have been scrambling to find a cool device to compete. Last year, Verizon Wireless introduced the LG Voyager, which has a touch screen that flips up to expose a QWERTY keypad. Earlier this year, in anticipation of an iPhone with 3G, Verizon launched the LG Dare, a 3G touch-screen phone with a
mobile browser.

Running the gamut
Android can be used by any phone manufacturer to build any kind of mobile phone–anything from a simple, inexpensive phone for the developing world to a power user’s high-end smartphone.

Marguerite Reardon co-wrote this article.

Some of the features that are rumored to be included are a full QWERTY keyboard, 3G support as well as Wi-Fi, a full HTML browser, embedded GPS, easy access to Google applications such as maps, YouTube, instant messaging, e-mail, SMS texting, a 3-megapixel camera, a music player, video recorder and player, and a memory card slot.

“I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer. As long as Apple continues to innovate and create a good user experiences and sexy devices, there’s always a place for that,” Bruggeman said. “If the mobile phone market is 3 billion units and Apple has 15 million, they are a pimple on the mobile phone landscape. There will always be a room for a pimple on the landscape. Google is playing for the rest of the enchilada.”

Because much of Android is open-source software, it can be used for free, and that means those selling phones can spend their money on better hardware rather than on software license fees, Bruggeman said. In addition, other individual programmers or interested companies can help improve that open-source software, so at least theoretically Android could become an exercise in collective engineering the way Linux has been.

Let’s take a look at Sony’s $1,699 STR-DA5300ES. What does the extra $1,000 buy you? Not so much. Faroudja DCDi Cinema Technology, great. Video sources connected via composite, S-video and component cables get bumped up to a 1080p over HDMI. The Sony is rated to deliver 120 watts per channel versus the Denon’s 90 per. Oh, and it boasts six HDMI inputs. That’s cool, and I’m probably overlooking some details, but does that sound like it’s worth an extra $1,000-plus?

The receiver manufacturers have so loaded up their midprice receivers they killed the market for the upper-end models. I think that’s great. Before they wise up, take advantage of their stupidity.

Are high-end A/V receivers, which for the purpose of this blog is any receiver with a MSRP over $1,500, worth it? True, they’re loaded with features, stuff like all of the latest surround formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio. But wait a sec–Denon’s soon to be released $649 AVR-1909 receiver has them, too. It’s got three HDMI inputs and all of the latest Audyssey auto speaker set up and equalization doodads.

Denon AVR-1909–why pay more?

Thing is, I just reviewed three high-end receivers for a magazine, and I do think they sound a wee bit better than the lower-price alternatives. We’re not talking day and night differences here, so I’ll pretty much guarantee adding an extra $1,000 to your speaker budget will deliver much better sound. So instead of buying a $1,700 A/V receiver–and (for example) a $1,500 sat/sub package–get a $700 receiver and a $2,500 sat/sub package. Total cost will be the same, but the sound will be way better with better speakers and/or sub.

“We are the No .2 operator in the United States,” an Iberdrola representative told Forbes.com on Monday. “So I wouldn’t say that we were concerned.”

Wind power is booming in the United States because it is cost-competitive with power generation from fossil fuels.

Expect to see more of these, if Iberdrola meets its wind investment goals.

The company’s president Ignacio Galán set the target Sunday at a conference in Houston, where he said the company intends to double its electricity capacity, mainly through wind, in the U.S. which is now at nearly 2.4 gigawatts. Iberdrola’s target is to have 15 percent market share by 2010, the company said in a statement.

Wind turbines are also in short supply, due to the high demand, which is pushing out the time schedules for large wind projects.

An investment tax credit that gives renewable energy project developers a 30 percent tax credit is set to expire at the end of this year. Several attempts to renew it have failed, which clean tech investors and companies say is stalling business in the U.S.

In its coverage of the Iberdrola announcement, Forbes.com noted that the company does not own transmission networks in the U.S. but doesn’t not see that as a barrier.

Big enough for Spanish energy developer Iberdrola to commit to investing $8 billion in the U.S. over the next two years.

Last week, oil developer T. Boone Pickens ordered the first wind turbines for what will be the largest wind farm in Texas, the Pampa Wind Project, which is estimated to cost $2 billion.

(Credit:
GE)

Although there is great enthusiasm for wind power in the U.S., the industry is currently hampered by delays and policy uncertainly.

Correction at 9:40 a.m. PDT: The spelling of the company’s name and oil developer T. Boone Pickens have been fixed.

How much potential is there for wind and solar energy in the United States?