GIPS, a San Francisco-based company that licenses intellectual property including codecs for audio and video says it has come up with a technology that would allow third party developers to embed video chat in their iPhone-related applications. The new technology is called VideoEngine (VEI)Mobile.

The VideoEngine utilizes H.263 (video codec), GIPS wideband/HD voice (iPCM-Wb) and G711 (audio codec) to provide functionality that would allow real time video chat or multi-point video conferencing. They are using the H.263 codec because they (and in turn the developers who use VEI) don’t have to pay royalties.

Despite GIPS’s statement, VEI can’t really offer real two-way video chat today. Why? because the iPhone doesn’t have a frontal camera. At best, VEI can be embedded in an mobile application and thus can receive video from some PC-type application, say from your PC using your IM client to the iPhone. Just not the other way around. Audio is bidirectional. In December 2009, Fring had launched a one way video calling service as well.

That said, I can only see one real value proposition of this new offering: tight synchronization of voice and video that will end up on the iPhone. I am not sure if that will be enough for GIPS to get the traction. For video conferencing to take off on the iPhone platform, two things need to happen: first, there needs to be a frontal camera for two way video chats. Secondly, Skype needs to offer a video chat offering.

Skype it seems is unlikely to use VEI. They have already licensed H.264 video technology, which is being included in many mobile phones. I wouldn’t be surprised that they end up using some sort of scalable video version of H.264 for their mobile clients, one that adjusts the video quality based on the network conditions.

As for GIPS, let’s just hope iPhone gets an upgrade of its dreams: one that involves a video on the front of the device.

Cisco forecasts that by 2014 we will be using 3.6 exabytes a month on mobile networks worldwide, according to its Visual Networking Index figures released today. (For those pondering an exabyte, it’s equal to 1 billion gigabytes or half a trillion MP3 files.) And by 2014, we’re apparently going to be sucking down 40 exabytes annually from our mobile broadband networks, up from a total of 1.08 exabytes in all of 2009.

A desire for always-on connectivity is behind Cisco’s incredible predictions for growth as well as the increasing number of devices that allow us to surf the mobile web with wired-Internet ease. If the mobile web is a cocktail served at a bar, our devices have moved from being thin cocktail straws to data-quaffing iPads. Plus, more of us are now able to drink legally, which means more bar patrons and more consumption by those bellying up to the mobile broadband bar. It’s both a nightmare and dream for mobile operators, and a clear opportunity for equipment vendors like Cisco and gadget makers like Apple.

For example, today, the average mobile broadband connection generates 1.3 gigabytes of traffic per month — while consumers using mobile broadband via a data card pay around $60 a month for a 5 GB-chunk of access. By 2014, the average mobile broadband connection will generate 7 GB of traffic per month, which means that operators are going to have to revamp their pricing plans while also lowering the costs associated with sending bits through their networks in order to keep margins up.

I’ll have more analysis on the numbers later, but here are the bare bone stats, which should be enough to knock your socks off — or strike terror into the hearts of mobile operators — some of which can’t even handle the data deluge caused by the iPhone.

• Global mobile data traffic has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month — the equivalent of 23 million DVDs.
• Global mobile data traffic today is growing today 2.4 times faster than global fixed broadband data traffic.
• Smartphones and laptop air cards will drive more than 90 percent of global mobile traffic by 2014.
• Of the anticipated traffic, Wi-Fi offload and other offload will only reduce mobile data use by 25 percent by 2014.
• Global mobile video traffic is forecasted to be 2.3 exabytes per month by 2014.
• By 2014, more than 400 million of the world’s Internet users will access the network solely through a mobile connection.
• Today, smartphones are only 10 percent of all handsets in use, but generate over 50 percent of global mobile data handset traffic.

Related GigaOM Pro report (subscription required): 

How AT&T Will Deal With iPad Data Traffic

Peter Warden, a former Apple engineer, likes to analyze data — so much so that he started scraping public profiles and photos from hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts about a year ago, and now has data collected from more than 200 million around the world. He wrote a fascinating post recently on his personal blog about what that data shows about how interconnected (or disconnected) users in the various American states are. The graph below is reprinted from that post, with Warden’s permission:

In a nutshell, Warden’s data analysis showed that Facebook users in the U.S. can be roughly segmented into seven regions, which he named facetiously:

• Stayathomia: This belt’s defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far.


• Dixie: Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country.


• Greater Texas: Unlike Stayathomia, there’s a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.


• Mormonia: The only region that’s completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho.


• Nomadic West: The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities; it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county.


• Socalistan: LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first.


• Pacifica: Tightly connected to each other, it doesn’t look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation.

Of course, Warden’s data — which he collected in the course of analyzing Facebook profiles and fan pages worldwide for various corporate customers — only reflects what users of Facebook choose to reveal about themselves, and many don’t include all their friends or other information in their public profiles. As large as it is, Facebook also still represents only a small slice of the American population, and likely a fairly homogeneous slice at that, although the social network is becoming more cosmopolitan, according to the most recent demographic survey of Facebook users. Marshall Kirkpatrick has more detail on what Warden is up to in this post.

The Wall Street Journal in a blog post today points to a research note by Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope that he wrote in the wake of meeting with Apple executives. It reads:

Apple wants the iPad to be the best device for a few key use cases. For instance, the company believes it could eventually be seen as superior to both handheld and notebook devices for browsing the Internet, using the App Store, and consuming mobile media (video, photos, and e-books). Nevertheless, in other areas, notebooks, the iPhone, or an iPod may be more appropriate. This clear segmentation of capabilities suggests that cannibalization may be less of a concern than most currently believe.

As The Wall Street Journal then goes on to explain:

Shope also wrote that despite the seemingly aggressive pricing of the iPad — the lower-than-expected price points range from $499 to $829 — Apple seemed to indicate it would respond with price cuts if demand for the device wasn’t revving up the way it liked. ‘While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble (pricing could change if the company is not attracting as many customers as anticipated),’ Shope wrote.

Initially everyone was expecting Apple to launch a device that would cost as much as $1,000, but instead the company came in at half that price — and it’s still getting criticized. Given that the iPad hasn’t even made it to the market yet, this conversation about price cuts is kinda moot.

Let’s assume that Apple does have to cut the device’s price — it still has lots of room to make a profit with it. According to Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, the base model $499 iPad will cost about $290 to manufacture and has a gross margin of 42.9 percent. Have you checked the gross margin on a netbook, Nokia smartphone or even a Motorola device lately? I rest my case.

Regardless, I’m amazed at the play being given to this iPad price cuts story. People seem to be overlooking the fact that Apple’s business model is in transition. In addition to being a hardware and software company, it’s becoming a “transactions” company.

Apple, thanks to its exclusive deals with phone companies such as AT&T, has learned the art of making money over a period of time. Selling digital media — video games, books, music, videos and periodicals — is just an extension of that very basic idea: an ongoing relationship with customers. Thanks to iTunes and the App Store, Apple has one-click access to customers. If Apple can sell a lot of video games, songs and videos (via iTunes) and books (via iBooks) and gets to keep 30 percent of the total sales, then it behooves the company to sell more and more iPads. Even if it means cutting iPad prices — which it won’t have to.

I am of the opinion — admittedly a minority opinion for now — that the iPad, despite all the early skepticism, is going to find its place in this world. In fact, over a period of time (admittedly longer), I believe its success will replicate that of both the iPhone and the iPod touch.

And I bet Steve Jobs believes the very same thing. As he told Rolling Stone back in 1994:

“I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”

A post yesterday on TechCrunch did a wonderful job of illustrating how many more men than women there are in the U.S. venture capital industry — and how that imbalance extends to tech entrepreneurs. It also extrapolated a rationalization for this gap that, while reasonable, was incorrect. Silicon Valley’s gender problem isn’t that complicated — it boils down to babies. As in, those who have them can’t be a startup CEO, too.

Vivek Wadhwa, the author of the TechCrunch post, included a nice list of reasons why women entrepreneurs and women-led venture-backed companies are scarce:

Sharon Vosmek, CEO of venture accelerator Astia doesn’t think that VCs have an overt bias against women. Instead, it’s the way the venture-capital industry operates. Vosmek says that these “systematic or hidden biases” include: 1. that VCs hold clear stereotypes of successful CEOs (they call it pattern recognition, but in other industries they call it profiling or stereotyping.) John Doerr publicly stated that his most successful investments – and the no-brainer pattern for future investments – were in founders who were white, male, under 30, nerds, with no social life who dropped out of Harvard or Stanford (2009 NVCA conference). 2. VCs invest in people they know. If women aren’t in their natural networks, they won’t get through the door. We know that still today, men and women network in separate business networks. 3. VCs want to invest in serial entrepreneurs. (This further reduces the chance for woman entrepreneurs.) 4. The VC community is obviously male dominated, and it just got worse…after the cold freeze VCs experienced over the past 24 months, many women partners exited the industry. As the Diana Project research shows, a firm with women General Partners is more likely to invest in women entrepreneurs.

However, it was a comment from TechCrunch reader Chem that actually laid bare the issue of why women aren’t better represented in tech — essentially, it’s because women have babies, and the perception is that when we do, we leave the workforce to take care of them. And while Chem’s stereotype isn’t correct ( I was back at work and even took on a more demanding job soon after my daughter was born), the fact that women are “supposed” to bear the brunt of raising children is a huge reason why women aren’t more visible at the helm of venture-backed startups. It’s the babies, stupid.

Or rather, it’s the idea that women should shoulder the burden of raising children, an idea that dominates our society to such a degree that many women and men buy into it without question. Society at large explicitly perpetuates motherhood and not parenthood (check out the New York Times, from stories that demand mothers learn how to speak nanny, to the spate of “wow-men-are-now-staying-at-home” stories), and implicitly enforces the status quo through its policies around access to childcare for babies, school calendars and thousands of other complicating factors that any family, be they dual-income or single-parent, must navigate.

And when that navigation does require a trade-off, it’s generally still the mother that makes it. Which means that yes, once women have babies there are forces that can keep them from taking on a 90-hour-a-week startup gig. We can bemoan a scarcity of female role models in tech, entice women into the math and science professions or even blame women who leave the work force to take care of kids for the lack of gender diversity, but to fix the problem, we’re going to have to discuss the lack of parity between men and women when it comes to raising children.

Because Wadhwa is right: Gender diversity is important, and women shouldn’t have to choose between raising a family and building a startup any more than men should.

Image courtesy of Flickr user anonymous to you

If you can’t recall the collective anxiety that is attached to the emergence of digital and networked technologies just take a peek back at the news headlines of yesteryear. The fear over computerized voting systems started soon after the 2000 U.S. presidential election debacle, while worry about online banking began when the first bank put its customer accounts on the web. But as the latest systems, including vehicles and the power grid, crossover to the digital and computing world, and get connected to communication networks, expect the same, if not more, fear.

The Transformation: Grid, Vehicles

Both vehicles and the power grid are undergoing massive transformations involving IT. The so-called smart grid industry has emerged to sell utilities infrastructure based on communication networks, and companies are building software and services to help utilities manage energy data. The smart grid is projected to generate $210 billion in investment between 2010 and 2015, and President Obama has called for the installation of 40 million smart (digital and connected) meters in the U.S.

Cars are going digital and connected, too. Vehicles are now “packed with up to 100 million lines of computer code,” and have “at least 30 microprocessor-controlled devices,” points out the New York Times this weekend. Many automakers offer services based on network connections, like location-based navigation (enabled by a GPS system) or GM’s OnStar System which is based on a cellular connection.

As electric vehicles emerge in the coming years there will be even more uses of software and communication networks to manage the vehicle’s charge. Utilities will have to manage the collective charging of customers, so that EV charging doesn’t take down their grids. Electric vehicle infrastructure player Better Place will be offering its customers “a comprehensive suite of in-car services designed to provide drivers with the best possible EV driving experience,” when it launches commercially in 2011. Those types of services include directing drivers to available and nearby charge points, and rely heavily on software, computing and communication connections.

The Anxiety

Before electric vehicles even hit the mainstream market, though, consumers are already getting anxiety over computer and software dependent cars. Last week Toyota said that a software glitch is responsible for the braking problem in its Prius hybrid 2010. That’s led to a new round of media headlines taking a hard look at the trend of software and computing in cars (like the New York Time’s this weekend: The Dozens of Computers That Make Modern Cars Go (and Stop)).

I’ve experienced software glitches when driving a Smart Car that’s networked in the car sharing service City Car Share, and believe me it wasn’t fun. The Smart Car has a lot of embedded software, and the City Car Share service has its own software and IT systems, and I’ve had to call customer service several times in order to restart the computing system (kinda like rebooting a computer) to get the car to work properly. As the drivers of the Toyota Prius’ with glitchy software found: beta software just doesn’t cut it at 60 mph.

The smart grid has also had growing pains. “The Bakersfield issue,” emerged when residents in Bakersfield, Calif. filed a suit against utility PG&E for smart meters that they claimed boosted electricity bills. The problem was a combination of unusually hot weather and a lack of proper customer outreach, but at the heart of the issue was anxiety surrounding the introduction of the new digital meter.

When Digital Meets High Impact

Both vehicles and the power grid have different relationships with consumers, compared to entertainment, communications and some types of information. When your wireless network drops or your browser crashes and you’re sitting in front of a computer, it’s annoying but not life threatening. Software problems and dropped communication connections could have much more serious consequences in a vehicle (crashing, being stranded somewhere, not being able to get to work, etc), and for the power grid (outages, surges, etc).

Problems with reliability of software and computing in high-impact areas has been studied for years. For example, health care — last month I read this New York Times article that investigated faulty software that caused a string of medical errors for radiation treatments and lead to several deaths. It’s terrifying to think software that controls radiation shot at someone’s chest, could freeze as easily as my Firefox browser. The aviation and defense industries have long been dealing with the impact of software and communication systems on their high-impact technologies.

There’s also the worry over networks being more susceptible to security concerns. Adding a two-way network connection, means something, or someone, can access the data — that’s the whole point of connecting it to a network. But that also means the connected system can be hacked and used in ways that it wasn’t intended. The smart grid is no different, and computer security firm IOActive has shown a virtual demo of how a worm or virus could infiltrate connected digital smart meters and crash a power grid. The U.S. government is paying particular attention to smart grid security, following warnings from the Internet industry. How long until we see headlines about hacked cars?

The companies building the future of digital, connected vehicles and the power grid will be smart to look at the lessons learned through the digitization of some of these high-impact area, like aviation, defense and health care. These companies will just have to realize how sensitive the transition is to digital, connected systems and remain hyper vigilant. But expect to see a lot more headlines about digital anxiety over vehicles and the power grid in the future.

But ultimately the transformation to digital, connected vehicles and the power grid can’t slow down due to digital anxiety. Digitizing these 2 sectors — which are two of the biggest factors that contribute to the world’s carbon emissions and global warming — is fundamental to fight climate change.

Image courtesy of FlickrJunkie’s photostream Creative Commons.

Amazon’s recent announcement of dramatically higher royalty rates for authors and book publishers, a move designed to level the playing field with Apple’s iPad tablet, seems to be having some effect: another author has signed an exclusive book deal for the Amazon Kindle. In this case, Gavin de Becker — author of several books about security — has agreed to release expanded and updated editions of two of his books, “The Gift of Fear” and “Just 2 Seconds.” A news release says that while both books have been available as print copies for some time, this is the first time “The Gift of Fear” has been available electronically, and both will be exclusive to Amazon’s Kindle Store for one year.

This deal appears to be very similar to a Kindle exclusive announced by author Stephen Covey — creator of the “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People” line of books — in December, which saw the author transfer the rights to two of his books from Simon & Schuster to an electronic publisher in order to do the deal with Amazon. As part of that arrangement, Covey was to get about 50 percent of the proceeds from the sales of Kindle versions of the books, in contrast to the usual 25 percent that most publishers provide. Amazon will have exclusive e-book rights for a year.

Last month, Amazon signed another high-profile author to an ebook exclusive: best-selling Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho agreed to give the company and the Kindle exclusive rights to Portugese versions of 17 of his popular novels. None of Coelho’s books have been available in e-book format before. A recent report also confirmed that British author Ian McEwan signed an exclusive deal last year for electronic publishing rights to five of his books in return for 50 percent of the royalties.

One wonders whether any of these authors will want to renegotiate their exclusive deals, now that Amazon is offering authors and publishers 70 percent royalties instead of just 50 percent. In any case, the upward pressure on royalty rates is a welcome sign of increased competition in book publishing, thanks to both Amazon and Apple, and that is something many authors will no doubt be pleased to see.

Meanwhile, Amazon continues its fight to keep e-book prices low, although it appears to be steadily losing ground in that battle. After Macmillan refused to lower its prices to the $9.99 that Amazon was demanding, the electronic retailer yanked the publishers books from its shelves (both print and electronic), but was later forced to capitulate. Since then, two other publishers have also renegotiated higher prices with the company. Amazon has since put print versions of Macmillan books back on its virtual shelves, but according to a recent report, it is still not stocking Kindle versions.

Related content from GigaOM Pro:

Why Closed Platforms Might Not Be So Bad

Google plans to add a stream of recent status messages and media from users’ contacts to Gmail as soon as this week, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The feature, which could be announced at a press event tomorrow, would be very much in line with what Google told us it wanted to do to catch up on the social front in 2010: as I wrote last month, “to expose and elicit more of the social network built into the tools that many of us already use.” It also makes a lot of sense, given how central email is to our daily existence and our connections to people.

According to the WSJ’s unnamed sources, the new feature would be a “module” in Gmail where users can click through to see a stream of friends’ updates, YouTube video sharing and Picasa photos. It would be an extension of Gmail’s instant-messenger style status messages, which are displayed along with presence information and currently aren’t archived for search or perusal.

The problem with lightweight incorporation of status updates, though, is that the tools around social streams have already gotten quite complex. Gmail will have to do a good job of understanding who we want to hear from, letting us group and block contacts, and integrating with other updates like Facebook and Twitter. If Google really wants to do this right, it should open everything up to outside developers.

Meanwhile, Yahoo already shows an aggregated stream of status messages and online activity within its web mail product; it calls the feature Yahoo Updates.

Thumbnail photo by Flickr user christyxcore.

Collaboration is in full swing on the web, for both social and work-oriented purposes. Most of us can rattle off the well-known applications that are available, but there are many targeted, useful collaboration apps that are more offbeat. Here are 10 of them, many of them free.

Redliner. If you’ve ever tried to collaborate with others on documents over email, you know that version control problems and many other issues can arise. Redliner is becoming one of the more popular online tools to get around these problems. Unlike, say, Google Docs, it offers a complete commenting and revision system. Check it out in the screencast here. Redliner is currently being beta tested and you can use it for free, although it will eventually move to a paid monthly model.

doingText. Also on the document collaboration front, doingText has steadily grown into a robust, hosted platform. It’s available in a version for $5 a month, and you can share documents via randomly generated, unique URL.

Kablink. Kablink is a free and open source collection of collaboration components that lets groups work offline and online. When work is produced offline, it can automatically be synced with other users’ work online. Conferencing and wiki-like features are available.

Collanos Workspace. The motto of the Collanos Workspace free, open source collaboration platform is “Think outside the inbox.” To set up a team work environment, you click Create Space and begin inviting people. You can post files of many formats to collaborate on, instant message while you work and track pending tasks.

PBworks. At November’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, the folks behind PBWiki announced the addition of real-time collaboration tools to their wiki platform. The new PBworks suite of tools includes in-app instant messaging, live notifications of changes to an organization’s workspaces, live editing of documents and voice collaboration. There are also business and legal document templates available in an online store. Businesses, legal firms and schools pay just a few dollars per month per user (pricing varies by package) for PBWorks’ hosted collaboration apps.

Drop.io. The free file-sharing service Drop.io is used by many editors and writers across The GigaOM Network to easily upload files that can be shared with collaborators by simply providing a short URL to visit. Drop.io also now offers real-time collaboration features for tasks such as sharing files during phone conferences.

Socialtext. Based on the concept of combining a wiki with a blog, Socialtext provides an enterprise-level group collaboration platform. Every person who is a member of an organization’s Socialtext account gets their own dashboard –- or personal homepage –- where they can embed and arrange via drag-and-drop both personal and work information, images, and widgets. Email and microblogging are also integrated with the platform in useful ways. Socialtext is free for groups of 50 users or fewer who want basic features, and reasonably priced fee-based packages with all the bells and whistles are available.

e-tipi. e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a shared workspace through which ideas are fleshed out. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. You can export data to HTML for sharing on web pages, too. You can watch a demo here, and free accounts are available.

MemberHub. Group management and communication service MemberHub equips users with dashboards, discussion forums, shared calendars and many other tools for sharing ideas and collaborating. You can see how it works in this video, and pricing is found here, including a free version. 10 cents per person per month, purchased in blocks of 100.

Colaab. If you want a very feature-rich collaboration platform with a slick user interface, check out Colaab. Once you sign up for an account, you begin by creating a workspace. As Pamela over on WebWorkerDaily notes, “the workspace includes an integrated IM feature, and discussions are displayed in the upper part of the right-hand panel, while the lower part shows which users are participating.” Colaab is available in a starter version for $24 a month, which includes 1GB of storage and 10 workspaces.

Google is developing mobile software that would translate foreign languages almost instantly, according to a new report in The Times Online. Enabling automated voice communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages is a lofty goal, and one that may take many years to achieve — if it can be done at all.

The project combines Google’s speech-recognition technology with its automated system for translating text on computers, which now covers 52 languages. The company showcased the technology as a “concept demo” two months ago and now hopes to have a basic mobile translation system in place “within a couple of years,” according to the Times story. (A Google spokesman declined to tell me whether the project has moved beyond the concept stage and said the company has no news to announce.)

Delivering accurate translations in near real time will be an extremely difficult task, however. The language information behind such a service couldn’t possibly be stored and accessed on a phone, so Google will need the fast access to the cloud promised by HSPA and LTE. (Current speech-to-text engines send large chunks of data to the cloud for conversion to text, but translations during voice conversations will have to be infinitely faster.) And while Google’s speech recognition software is respectable, the company may need to bulk up its portfolio by acquiring another player on the field — Nuance, which has continued to expand its portfolio with the recent acquisitions of SpinVox and Jott , would be a particularly attractive (if expensive) option.

The value of technology that can deliver on-the-fly translations is evident in the Phraselator, a pricey gadget used by soldiers in Iraq. But to be effective in the mass market, voice recognition technologies must be able to consistently understand users regardless of speech patterns, dialects and other variables. Meanwhile, software must be able to determine context and other nuances to accurately translate one language to another. That’s difficult enough for humans to do; it may not be possible with technology alone.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):
• How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use

Image courtesy Flickr user Jeremy Brooks.

PayPal says it has suspended personal payments to and from India, as well as transfers to local banks in India, although it’s not clear from the company’s short blog post what the problem is or what’s being done to fix it. All it says is that the company is working with its ” business partners and other stakeholders to address questions they have about the service.” PayPal says that commercial payments can still be made to India but merchants in that country can’t withdraw funds in rupees to local Indian banks.

An unnamed analyst quoted by IDG News Service says that the changes may be related to new government rules in India that are intended to prevent or discourage money laundering. These rules, introduced last year, require financial intermediaries to verify the identity of clients carrying out international money transfers.

India has been taking steps to try and improve security as part of its anti-terrorism efforts, including banning the import of cell phones that don’t have an identity code and thus can’t be tracked. It’s possible that the Indian government is concerned about PayPal money transfers being used to fund terrorism, and is requiring the company to either verify who is making and receiving the payment or block the transfer.

According to one online forum discussing the topic, PayPal has been reversing payments since Feb. 1, sending users an email that states:

Dear SENDER, Your payment of $XX.XX has been returned to you. If you sent the payment with a bank account, the funds will be returned to your PayPal balance. If you paid with a credit card, the amount will be credited back to your card. We returned the payment to you because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India… If this payment was a personal payment, such as a gift to a friend or family member, then we request that you find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India. We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience. Thank you, PayPal.

Another user said that he or she received an email from PayPal saying the company had suspended “specifically those funds transfers that do not have an underlying exchange of goods or services.” The email recommended that the seller contact the buyer and ask them to pay again, and specify that goods were the reason for payment. Other disgruntled and confused PayPal users are discussing the issue in forums here and here.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user quaziefoto

Our friends at Forrester Research touched off a bit of a brush fire this past weekend when it said it would limit its analysts to blogging about research-related topics on the company’s corporate web site, Forrester.com, and decreed that any personal blogs maintained on other domains must be strictly about personal matters. Twitter is apparently not included in this edict, according to a tweet by Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, co-author of the book “Groundswell.” Dennis Howlett of ZDNet called the move an “Epic E2.0 Fail” while CloudAve blogger Jacob Morgan said it was “the corporate research equivalent of suicide.”

Here at GigaOM — and specifically at our subscription research arm, GigaOM Pro — we obviously believe that our writers and analysts benefit from being part of the social web in as many different ways as possible. They tweet, have their own blogs and use other social sites.

It’s true that social tools help analysts develop their own personal brands (as both Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang did while at Forrester), but while some firms might see this as being in competition with the development of the overall corporate brand, we disagree. In a social media- and web-centric world, the personal brand is arguably as important as — and in some case, even more important than — the corporate brand. In any case, the two can no longer be separated from one another.

We heard the same kinds of arguments from traditional media companies in the early days of blogging, and we all know how that turned out. Some media outlets have been trying to restrict what their writers do and say on Twitter and other social networks as well. The reality is that people identify more and more with individuals, and in some ways always have: Do people go to see a Warner Brothers film? No, they go to see “Avatar” by James Cameron, or to watch George Clooney. Do they look for music by EMI? No, they listen to Norah Jones. And the company behind the brand benefits every time that happens. Live Nation is a good example: a record label as well as a live concert company, it puts the artist front and center. Same goes for media and research.

In his blog post, Bernoff defended the new policy as a necessary step, saying Forrester is “an intellectual property company, and the opinions of analysts are our product.” But a strong analyst who connects with readers and builds a following, wherever that following might occur, is a benefit to the company they work for, even if he or she eventually leaves to pursue other opportunities. That is the nature of a web-based business — something the research industry is becoming, whether it likes it or not.

Trying to confine analysts and control the access they have to readers through the web is not only wrongheaded (in our view) but ultimately futile. Strong analysts who are treated in this way will leave anyway, thus defeating the purpose. We believe that social media tools can be used both to build personal brands and to benefit the overall corporate brand, and that is what we encourage. If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments.

The change in the mobile phone market caused by the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 has slightly cut the profits for the handset industry overall, but has most severely affected Nokia and Sony Ericsson, according to data released today from Deutsche Bank. The investment bank issued a note showing how Apple and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, garner most of the profits in the handset industry despite their relatively small market share.

The report also shows an incredible loss for Nokia, which saw its share of handset profits cut in half by the shift in the handset market that occurred after the iPhone was released. In 2007 Nokia made about 60 percent of the profits in the industry, and in 2009 it had about 31 percent. Meanwhile the adoption of mobile broadband (and likely the fact that the iPhone is a consumer-focused device only available from one carrier) has helped RIM take about a fifth of the overall industry profits in 2009 as more corporations and people tried to access email and the web on their phones.

More on Mobile Apps

• Fear & Loathing Over iPad Pricing Tech Insider
• Android This Week: Nexus One Gets Touch; 720p from Samsung Tech Insider
• iPad Launch Spawns a Tablet AppFund Tech Insider
• AT&T Seen Keeping the iPhone Through 2011: Analyst Tech Insider

However, 2009 represented a bad year for the average industry profits, which the bank believes will rise in 2010 and 2011. Part of that might be a better economic climate, but it’s also likely that after a few years of playing catch-up with the iPhone, the handset makers now have something that can compete with it thanks to Android and more web-friendly phones. The real questions ahead for handset makers are which ones will fall by the wayside thanks to the overall shift in the market? Palm and Sony Ericsson aren’t due for a comeback based on this data and Motorola’s overall share of the profits isn’t much to build a business on.

Mobclix has struck a deal to integrate Nielsen’s ad targeting data into its mobile ad exchange, the two announced today, the latest effort to deliver highly targeted mobile ads. The pact allows Mobclix to resell Nielsen’s PRIZM and ConneXions products, which slot consumers into more than 150 segments based on lifestyle and usage patterns. Marketers will be able to target pitches based on a user’s age and gender as well as location, spending power and tech savviness — features that will give advertisers more confidence in a market where hard data is difficult to access.

Detailed user information has become increasingly valuable in mobile, where an explosion in the number of mobile apps has led to a glut of advertising inventory in the industry over the last 18 months, forcing CPMs (cost per thousand ad impressions) down. So app developers and content owners are scrambling to find ways to boost the value of mobile ads in order to ramp up ad revenues. Mobclix claims its new partnership with Nielsen will enable developers and publishers to produce CPMs that are 20-100 percent higher than the market at large.

Mobclix offers mobile analytics that provide developers with information about how consumers use their mobile applications, and the company claims a penetration rate of 85 percent across iPhone and iPod touch unique devices. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup is vying for a chunk of a mobile advertising market that will generate $13 billion in revenues by 2013, according to Gartner, as smartphones and flat-rate data plans become more affordable for mainstream consumers. The space still faces substantial hurdles, from a lack of performance metrics to consumer privacy concerns, but providing more detailed information about individual consumers will surely help entice advertisers to invest more heavily in mobile.

Related research from GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):
• Why 2010 Still Won’t Be the Year of Mobile Advertising
• The Attraction and Threat of Offer-Based Ads in Mobile
• Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?

Images courtesy The Nielsen Company.

Some of the lessons learned from the commercials during Super Bowl 2010: Beer solves lots of problems, women hold men back from their dreams and this year, pants are optional. But there were also some highlights for the web video world.

Flo TV pushed their mobile TV viewing device to hen-pecked men dragged out who miss football games because they’ve been dragged out to go shopping, but they also got behind will.i.am’s My Generation remix.

Google had a relatively clever ad in the second half pushing their search ability but, um, did anyone need to be told that Google is a good search destination? Was this the manifestation of some crazy Bing paranoia?

There were also two homages to the Dramatic Chipmunk — Carmax replicating the original video twice in 30 seconds (though with different animals):

And Vizio brought in the rodent as well as a bunch of other viral stars (including Tay Zonday and “the Numa Numa guy”) to push their web-connected TV.

As for commercial hosting — the ads weren’t even findable on CBSSports.com (to be fair, they were also talking a lot about this football game that was also going on today). And while Spike TV was definitely the game leader when it came to getting the ads online, Hulu’s clever voting interface should probably give them a long-term advantage.

When it comes to the football side of Super Bowl XLIV, everyone knows that today’s matchup pits the New Orleans Saints against the Indianapolis Colts. But there’s another side to the NFL game that is just as competitive and just as expensive, and that’s the advertising that takes place during the broadcast. That battle will see Coca-Cola go up against flavored sugar-water competitor Pepsico. Except that Pepsi won’t be at the Super Bowl. As the company promised two months ago, it’s spending $20 million on a social media-powered community renewal campaign, and avoiding the Super Bowl altogether. And it looks as though Pepsi may already be ahead of the game, even before the kickoff.

In December, the company said that it had decided to forgo the advertising frenzy that is the Super Bowl for the first time in over two decades (although Doritos, which is owned by Pepsi, will air several ads during the game). Instead, Pepsi said it would spend $20 million funding community renewal events across the U.S. that would be selected through a “crowdsourcing” project similar to Dell’s Ideastorm, in which users get to vote on the various proposals submitted by other users.

The project, called Refresh Everything, launched last month with a web site, a Twitter presence and a Facebook page that now has over 400,000 fans. The company gives away “grants” of between $5,000 and $250,000 every month to community development proposals, including several promoted by football players who are competing in the Super Bowl. One project will upgrade the facilities at a residence for the family members of cancer patients, while another will train teachers for low-income communities.

According to a recent survey by Nielsen, this social media-powered campaign has already paid off in terms of increased media coverage for the soft-drink maker: The survey shows that Pepsi accounted for more than 21 per cent of the media coverage and online buzz around Super Bowl advertising — about 10 times as much as Coca-Cola. And the icing on the cake: The $20 million Pepsi is spending on its crowdsourcing project is about $10 million less than it usually spends on Super Bowl ads.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Cridland

With Super Bowl XLIV just hours away, it’s a little late to run out and take advantage of the insane sales on big-screen TVs. But that doesn’t matter as much as it would have a few years ago, as prices have been heading steadily lower not just for displays, but all elements in the video value chain.

Improvement to the video price/performance ratio means $99.99 can now buy an HD video camera roughly the size of three fingers, a pen that shoots video or a digital photo frame with video playback. Such a “squanderable abundance” of video capability is leading to video ubiquity, which will in turn mean the consumption of more bandwidth than ever before transforming networking, and require more processing and storage than ever, transforming IT, including cloud computing.

Video Ubiquity

That’s because lower-cost CMOS and CCD image sensors don’t just mean lower-cost video cameras; they mean ubiquitous video embedded everywhere. By analogy, consider computers, which used to be multimillion-dollar monuments encased in glass house data centers. Moore’s Law didn’t mean (just) cheaper data centers, but that compute power is now found in everything from thermometers to toasters to toys. Today’s car buyers often focus less on style and performance than on information technologies such as navigation systems, accident alerting, and on-board entertainment systems.

In other words, when things are cheap enough, it makes good business sense to leverage that so-called squanderable abundance in order to differentiate products or enhance customer relationships. Greeting cards today cost $4.95 whether they are just paper and glitter or can record and play back a voice message. They’ll still be $4.95 tomorrow, but be capable of recording and playing back a video greeting. At some point it will make sense for manufacturers to build a two-way live customer service videoconferencing capability into each dryer or copier or refrigerator, even if it’s only used once a year — or never used at all. Moreover, why wait for the customer to place that video call when cameras mounted inside the dryer can easily report that the drum belt is fraying?

Transformational Impact

The impact of more video devices in more places is the consumption of more bandwidth than ever before, which will transform networking. And more processing and storage will be required than ever before, which will transform IT, including cloud computing.

Today’s HDTV streams need somewhere between 4 and 7 megabits per second. 4K or, in a few years, Ultra-HDTV video streams will need tens of megabits per second, just for one channel. Increase that further for 60 frames per second, finer gradations of color, 3-D, and multiple screens, and network capacity will need to increase ten- or twenty-fold, or more.

Consumer networks are already mostly carrying rapidly growing amounts of user-generated video content, IPTV and peer-to-peer traffic, and Cisco forecasts that video will account for 90 percent of network traffic by 2013. Sure, there’s text and images and spreadsheets and slideshows traversing networks too, but it takes a lot of 140-character tweets to equal one full-length motion picture. Enterprises are increasingly adopting mobile, desktop, and immersive telepresence solutions. Meeting all this demand will require increased investment in wireless and wired networks.

IT will also be transformed. After all, how effective will databases that were designed for alphanumeric data be when a majority of future IT expenditures will be for acquiring, managing and maintaining enormous repositories of unstructured video for security/surveillance, merchandising optimization, field service, collaboration, depositions, entertainment, or applications we haven’t imagined yet?

The cloud will change, as it increasingly moves from just using multicore CPUs to also using GPUs, due to cost-effectiveness as well as the affinity that GPUs have for parallel compute-intensive tasks such as scene analysis, ray-tracing and compositing. Also, cloud-based video functions such as bridging, transcoding, transrating, and rate adaptation will become more important as they allow multiple users and devices using different technologies to interconnect.

So while the game may be over in a few hours, we are just now kicking off a new era in video.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req’d):

Not Your Grandfather’s Streaming Video Business

I’m writing from Phoenix, where a trip home met an abrupt end today. After one canceled flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia, I hopped over to the Valley of the Sun in hopes of a different flight home, but Mother Nature had other ideas. Since so many travelers are in a similar bind, all flights home are booked through Monday. I’ll be attempting a trip to JFK tomorrow and will mostly likely miss the first Super Bowl of my adult life. What the heck does that all that have to do with Google’s Nexus One? Well, this travel challenge has offered me a great way to test the recent 3G fix in a number of T-Mobile coverage areas. As bad as my travel woes are, the radio in my Nexus One just might be worse off than me.

Not long after the Nexus One first arrived in early January, users reported 3G issues here in the U.S. Since the phone only supports T-Mobile’s frequencies here, AT&T’s network was a non-factor in the situation. I had my phone shipped to me in Las Vegas since I was there for the Consumer Electronics Show and really didn’t notice any issues. And when I returned home to Philadelphia, all was well at first. In fact, I was testing the 3G immediately after we landed — as we were taxing to the gate, I saw 2.1 Mbps down and 1.2 Mbps up. But once I recovered from the CES and started looking closer at the Nexus One, I saw issues. In the same location, an evaluation Nokia N900 handset with my T-Mobile SIM card offered speeds similar to my first test. But after a quick SIM swap to the Nexus One, the best my Android handset could do was lowly EDGE speeds. Clearly, something appeared to be wrong.

Sure enough, reports of the same 3G issues flooded the official Google Nexus One support forums. There were a few different configuration workarounds offered, but they didn’t work for everyone. Finally, Google indicated that it was working with T-Mobile and HTC, the handset maker, to address the problems. After a few weeks of waiting, a software solution arrived in the form of an over-the-air update for all Nexus One handsets. In addition to the 3G fix, Google added other welcome features — the most prominent being pinch-to-zoom functionality in the native Gallery, Browser and Maps software. But did the firmware actually fix the 3G problem?

I upgraded my handset firmware just prior to my current travel excursion. I was more enamored by the multitouch features and didn’t pay too much attention to my 3G signal, even though I live in a T-Mobile data coverage area. So while waiting for my flight to San Francisco, I refocused my attention on the radio issue. What a perfect time and place to do just that, I thought. After all, Philadelphia International Airport is where I first saw fast bandwidth speeds on the phone. Too bad, I never saw them again in that very location. I ran various speed tests over the course of three hours, but never even saw half of the throughput I had seen a few weeks prior in the same place.

While there are a number of factors that affect 3G performance — location, other users, backhaul — the results weren’t sitting right with me. On Twitter, I asked if anyone else was still having problems. A few minutes later Michael Gartenberg, a Technology Analyst at Insight and columnist at Engdget, replied via Twitter: “yep. 3g actually worse. I used to get 3g at home. No more. But I do have multi touch.” Again, data throughput testing isn’t an exact science, but I can’t think of a single reason why Michael couldn’t get 3G at home using the same phone — especially after the software update.

So over the span of the last three days, I’ve been testing my handset using the SpeedTest application from Xtreme Labs — available for free in the Android Market — and also watching the data indicator on the phone. Aside from testing in Philadelphia, I’ve also tested in various San Francisco neighborhoods and in Phoenix. Every single testing location used was squarely in a solid T-Mobile 3G coverage area — no fringe areas, for example.

And in every location, I saw either miserable 3G speeds, signals bouncing between 3G and EDGE, or — even worse –both. I’m calling the last situation “worse” for a specific reason — signal bouncing like that can hit your handset battery hard. In fact, I barely used my Nexus One this morning in San Francisco and in the three hours I waited for my flight, the Nexus One battery dropped from 100% to 65%. I’d expect that kind of drain in three hours when actually using the phone, but not when it was basically dormant. The bouncing back-and-forth is really maddening. Sitting with the GigaOm team yesterday, for example, the phone was stationary but showed every possible combination of bars and signals. I saw GPRS, EDGE and 3G plus everything from no bars of service to four full bars, and everything in between. This was over the course of two hours in the exact same location.

Since my travel woes have stranded me in a Phoenix hotel, I now have some time to check in on the very same Google Nexus One support forum that I originally used to track the issue. As of now, there are 977 posts in the thread, spanning 25 pages. While I don’t know the location and coverage specifics for each individual user, there’s a fair number of posts indicating that handset owners are still seeing the same issues I am, even after the firmware update. There are some that say the issue is fixed for them, which is great. But either my testing is bad in three different cities, or there’s still an issue for quite a few people.

Is it hardware or software? Perhaps it’s both, or maybe there are some coverage issues that are affecting results. It’s to the point that I don’t really know. It could be any and all of the above. But what I do know is that something is still wrong with the 3G signal on my Nexus One — and I’m not alone.

If you have a Nexus One and use a T-Mobile SIM, I invite you to chime in on the comments, but more importantly, to participate in a poll. I’d like to see how isolated or widespread this is, for starters. And it just might help bring more attention to whatever the issue is. When I return home, I’ll do some additional testing. If I still see the issue, I’ll be testing the support channels for my Google Nexus One.

View This Poll
answers

At our GigaOM company meeting, Simon Mackie, editor of WebWorkerDaily shared his views on why every weekend he publishes and shares a collection of articles & blog posts he had read over the week. Taking a cue from him and my friend Paul Kedrosky, I am sharing a list of articles/posts which I think you should read this weekend.

• Rolling Stone Magazine interviews Steve Jobs: One from the archives. This interview conducted in 1994 lays out Jobs’ vision of the future. Much of it is coming true.

• Google Me to the Moon: In a beautiful nostalgic essay, Angels Riechers writes on Google Maps, GPS and the lost art of navigation & discovery.

• Davos is for wimps, ninnies, pointless, skeptics: Michael Lewis, perhaps one of my favorite writers skewers the Davos set. Rightfully so.

• Why spray on glass is going to change everything: This could be one of those game changing technologies that changes everything we touch.

• A rebuttal to Fraser Speirs’ Future Shock/ iPad Essay: Brian Dear writes a coherent, spew-less piece that is a joy to read, even though I don’t quite agree with many things he says.

• Winners, losers from Apple iPad roll out. EE Times does a good job of breaking down the silicon winners and losers of the Apple iPad rollout.

• Better user experience with story telling: Francisco Inchauste outlines how we can use story telling as a way to stand out in our increasingly crowded digital world. He thinks we can use stories to connect “as real people, not just computers.” I totally agree and have used this technique in my work as a magazine writer. Now as part of the new new media, I am constantly striving to learn how to do that on the web.

And a bonus self-serving link to my post about MTV’s new logo in almost 30 years. Even though I was part of MTV generation, for me in this post Internet age, MTV is completely irrelevant. Have a read!

PS: If you would like to send interesting essays and writings, please drop me a note using the “contact” form.

As you know, we’ve been following Mozilla’s Weave Sync project for a long time. Last week, the Weave Sync add-on for Firefox was made available. Installable as an extension for Firefox, Weave is way to synchronize bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history and open browser tabs across multiple browsers and computers.

Now Mozilla Labs is hoping that developers will adopt Weave Sync and build upon the service using a set of Weave Sync and User APIs. Mozilla is launching a whole range of developer resources that also include Python & Javascript client libraries.

The idea behind this effort is “to increase the number of places where you can securely access, and have your personal data readily available to you, independent of whether or not Firefox is available,” Mozilla notes on its blog. In other words, developers can use Weave Sync services in new products independent of Firefox and thus build new apps-based that leverage our browser & browsing specific data.

This first set of APIs focuses on enabling Weave clients to provide user’s access to their stored data from other devices and environments. Future APIs will provide third-party web sites and applications the ability to request permission and obtain explicit access only to specific user data to augment a users’ Web experience, e.g. providing personalized recommendations based upon a user’s bookmarks or search history.

Mozilla has also released a couple of experimental clients such as the web-based Weave Client, an iPhone Weave Client, a WebOS Weave Client and a command line Weave client. Mozilla Weave has been over two years in the making. I first wrote about it in 2007