There was a time in the United States when anything that called into question moral clarity, the black and white of a clear perspective on right and wrong, was deeply distrusted – if not actively shut down. Seeing the world through other peoples’ eyes was considered not an essential act of empathy but a slippery slope into drug use, homosexuality and communism.

Fortunately, brave pioneers of intellectual freedom helped us bust out of the 1950′s and begin to appreciate the world in all its rich and painful complexity and subjectivity. As of today, with the launch of News.me on the iPad – there’s now an app for that. (iTunes Link) A collaboration between the New York Times and the data wonks at URL shortener Bitly, News.me shows you the news from other peoples’ perspectives – and other people are very different from ourselves! I have found it quite appealing to use for the last several months – it’s been one of my very favorite ways to learn about the world using my iPad. Even before launch, hundreds of publishing partners are intrigued as well. It’s a strikingly new model for both users and publishers.

The Business of Your News, for Me

News.me has been eagerly anticipated by media-watchers for months. Prototyped by engineers at the New York Times, bought and built out by Betaworks (the Times now owns equity in Bitly) with data and interface rock-stars from Bitly and contracted friends, the app is a substantially new type of news consumption experience. The team behind it hopes consumers will appreciate it enough to pay for it at 99 cents a week or $34.99 for the year. The revenue will be split with publishers whose content is displayed in the app, on a per-click basis. Billing is done automatically through iTunes, weekly or yearly. There’s a free one-week trial.

“We have no interest in taking ads in any form,” says John Borthwick, CEO of Bitly and Betaworks. Borthwick says that more than 660 publishing partners are already participating. (Including ReadWriteWeb, the editorial department found out yesterday.)

Participating publishers range from the Guardian to the Associated Press to Al Jazeera to the Portland, Oregonian to the Bangkok Post in Thailand. A wide range of local, national and international publications are participating.

Borthwick believes that advertising-supported content is not suitable for the tablet experience and argues that a new business model is required.

But will users pay for it?

An Eye Opening App

What News.me offers is a strikingly original app. Open it up and you’ll find a line of faces you can swipe left or right. Those are your friends or recommended people who have opted-in to sharing their subscriptions on the News.me platform. You cannot read the streams of people who have not opted in.

Click on one of those faces and you’ll see a news feed of articles open. It may not look like the newsfeed of links and articles you’ve subscribed to for yourself on Twitter, though. Instead, what you’ll be shown is a river of news shared by the people on Twitter that your selected person has chosen to follow.

Those people know and follow different people than you do. Some people curate who they follow on Twitter very carefully and their News.me feeds are particularly distinct.

View Bit.ly data scientist Hilary Mason’s stream on News.me and you’ll see a flow of super-geeky articles shared by the people she’s following on Twitter: articles about statistics, data mining and social networking from a qualitative perspective.

View Microsoft youth social network researcher danah boyd on News.me and you’ll see something very different: anthropological articles about young people online, cyberbullying, teenage self-expression, mobile tech user studies.

At the end of each article News.me offers a list of other articles you might like. Borthwick believes that the experience also offers a meaningful antidote to the age-old dilema of internet-as-echo-chamber. The app makes it remarkably easy to find yourself reading content published and shared by people with world-views different than your own.

Seeing the online world through different peoples’ perspectives is a remarkably unique way to experience news consumption. Is it something that a large number of people will appreciate enough to pay for? I don’t know.

The app has a strong, clean visual design (thanks to the work of Justin Ouellette, best known for Muxtape), it’s an ad-free experience, it’s fast loading (there’s P2P style-magic going on in the background) and it’s got a fundamentally new model of user experience.

I hope enough other people find it compelling enough to make it a viable business – I certainly enjoy using it a lot myself. I am concerned that too few people may appreciate the empathetic experience of viewing the world through other people’s eyes – otherwise society would likely be quite different.

Maybe we were all just waiting for the iPad app for such an experience, though.

Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb is a syndication partner of the New York Times.

See Betaworks CEO John Borthwick speak about Designing Products and Businesses for the Emerging Web at the ReadWriteWeb 2WAY Summit NYC June 13-14.

Netflix was added to Standard & Poor’s S&P 500 index, which lists large-cap public companies, mostly from the U.S.

Netflix was previously a constituent of S&P MidCap 400 index, which roughly covers mid-cap U.S. companies. Together with F5 Networks and Newfield Exploration it will move into S&P 500, while The New York Times, Office Depot and Eastman Kodak drop from S&P 500 into S&P MidCap 400.

This is good news for the on-demand video streaming company, whose shares rose 5.6% on Thursday, as it faces ever-growing competition from companies such as Hulu and Amazon.

It’s also a sign of the times as an old media giant, The New York Times, officially loses the large-cap company title and starts slumming with other mid-sized companies.

[via Bloomberg]

Forget the rumor that Google acquired Groupon for $2.5 billion; the search giant is about to close a deal for the group-buying service for a whopping $5.3 billion to $6 billion, according to multiple reports.

It would be worth every penny.

The deal is worth $5.3 billion with an additional $700 million earnout based on performance, according to All Things D. The New York Times reports that a deal could be completed as soon as this week. With a price tag almost double that of DoubleClick, Google’s biggest acquisition to date, there are still plenty of ways for this deal to fall apart.

Earlier this year, Yahoo tried to snag the group-buying company, but failed. Google, with its $30+ billion cash reserve, reportedly then offered Groupon $3 billion to $4 billion. However, it was rebuffed, so the tech giant upped its offer.

Groupon pioneered the group-buying model through its deal-of-the-day business model. Launched in November 2008, the company has grown from an offshoot of ThePoint to a multi-billion dollar empire with thousands of employees worldwide. In April 2010, Groupon raised $135 million from Digital Sky Technologies, setting its value at over $1 billion.

If the Google deal does go through at a $6 billion valuation, that would mean that Groupon’s value has grown by more than $625 million per month or more than $20.8 million per day. That skyrocketing value is simply mindboggling.

Acquiring Groupon: Overpriced or a Genius Move?

There are many reasons to think that Google would be overpaying to get its hands on Groupon. Any company whose value rises by $20 million per day risks a flameout at the level of Pets.com. $6 billion is a stretch almost any way you slice it.

Still, Groupon has an asset that Google covets so highly that it’s willing to pay billions: local advertisers. Through its massive sales team, Groupon has built an impressive array of relationships with thousands of restaurants, spas and local businesses in hundreds of metropolitan areas. It’s a market that Foursquare, Facebook and Yelp all target, but none of them has figured out the formula like Groupon.

The group-buying website’s value isn’t in its technology — the flood of Groupon clones proves that — but in its unparalleled distribution. No other company in the world has the attention of local businesses that Groupon commands. And no other company has the expertise to turn that attention into a steady and consistent firehose of cash.

It’s that attention and expertise Google wants. This is about taking Google’s ad platform to the next level. It also doesn’t hurt that Groupon is set to exceed $500 million in revenue this year. It’s a multi-billion dollar business in the making.

If Google goes through with the biggest purchase in the company’s history, it will have the upper hand in local business advertising. That advantage could be so great that the courts stop this acquisition from ever happening. That’s why Google wants Groupon so badly that it’s willing to overpay by billions; if all goes according to plan, the search giant will be flooded with so much local advertising revenue that it will be able to buy a dozen Groupons.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Pagadesign

It has been revealed that Facebook has acquired the Fb.com domain. This news comes just days before its special event, where it is set to reveal an overhauled version of Messages that works like e-mail.

In September, the American Farm Bureau sold the Fb.com domain to an undisclosed buyer. Looking up the domain’s whois reveals that MarkMonitor, a brand protection and domain management company, is the Fb.com’s registrar. However, Domain Name Wire has revealed that the domain’s whois has been updated to reflect that Facebook is the domain’s administrator.

A recent report from All Facebook claims that Facebook is using Fb.com internally, but doesn’t quite know what Facebook intends to do with it. At the same time, The New York Times and TechCrunch claim that the company’s impending Messages overhaul will utilize the Facebook.com domain for user e-mail accounts.

What does that mean for Fb.com? Most likely, Fb.com will become the e-mail domain of the company’s 1,400+ employees. Yahoo does something similar; its staff uses @yahoo-inc.com e-mail addresses instead @Yahoo.com in order to avoid confusion between its employees and the hundreds of millions of users of its e-mail service.

Here’s our question: do users really want a @Facebook.com e-mail address? Would they actually use it in conjunction or in place of their current e-mail addresses? Let us know what you think.

Chinese company Hanvon Technology is set to unveil the first full-color tablet using e-ink technology, at the FPD International 2010 trade show in Tokyo Tuesday.

The e-ink tablet has a 9.68-inch color touchscreen with built-in Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. It will be available for $440 in China this March — about $150 less than the cost of a 16GB, Wi-Fi-only iPad in China.

With a 78% share of the market, Hanvon is the most popular maker of e-readers in China.

Black-and-white e-ink is currently used in the displays of 90% of e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Nobles’s Nook, according to The New York Times.

After the success of Apple’s iPad as an e-reading device and Barnes & Nobles’s recent announcement that the second-generation Nook would use a color LCD screen (rather than black-and-white e-ink), it seemed the days of colorless e-ink devices might be numbered. The addition of color could make e-readers more exciting for consumers who dislike the relatively short battery lives and glare of tablets with LCD displays.

Still, the new e-ink displays, which are produced by laying a color filter over standard black-and-white e-ink screens, are neither as vivid nor sharp as their LCD counterparts — The New York Times likened them to “faded color photograph[s]” — nor can they handle full-motion video.

Neither Amazon nor Sony have confirmed that e-readers with color e-ink are in the works.

“On a list of things that people want in e-readers, color always comes up,” Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading business division, told The New York Times. “There’s no question that color is extremely logical. But it has to be vibrant color. We’re not willing to give up the true black-and-white reading experience,” he said.

Image courtesy of The New York Times

PadPressed, the WordPress plugin that makes your blog feel like an iPad app when accessed from a native browser, today launches its CoverPad, which takes the “browser to iPad app” concept one iteration further and recreates the paginated feel of Flipboard in the iPad browser with HTML5/CSS3.

Says founder Jason Baptiste on the motivation behind launching the app, “We thought, what’s the craziest thing we could do to push the browser? And this was it.” Baptiste hasn’t actually spoken with anyone at Flipboard about this.

CoverPad features include the Flipboard-esque 3-D page flipping, accelerometer resizing based on landscape or portrait mode, HTML5 caching for faster loading and the ability to add the your blog’s app as a native to the homescreen. All PadPressed integrations now have a full loading screen, removing the browser bar so you virtually can’t tell the difference between your blog’s web page and a native app.

Baptiste tells me that PadPressed is currently profitable, with over 150 customers (including GE and Dictionary.com) using the plugin to make blogs look like iPad apps on the iPad browser. He also tells me that since it first came out three months ago, the New York Times began charging $50,000 up front to license their tablet CMS-viewing technology, versus $50 for the PadPressed plugin which includes both the original app and CoverPad.

CoverPad is PadPressed’s last WordPress-only play, as Baptise wants to transform its core business into a hosted service focusing on easy tablet publishing for all CMS and ebook publishers i.e. if someone accesses your Posterous blog from an iPad it automatically switches to PadPressed.

You know tablets are here to stay when people start offering tablet-specific publishing as a service.

Tags: Google Android, Larry Let, New York Times, Santa Monica

Google Is Testing Cars That Drive Themselves

Posted on 11 October 2010 by Leo Pang

Google announced today that it has developed cars that drive themselves automatically in traffic and that it has been testing them on the streets of California for months. It might seem like an unusual project for Google, but it could actually have big benefits.

We’re not just talking about cars running Google Android. This is the stuff of science fiction. The only accident that has occurred so far: One of the cars was rear-ended by a driver at a stop light. Human error!

The vehicles have been tested on 140,000 miles of California road, from Silicon Valley to Santa Monica. Each car is manned during the tests. One person sits in the driver’s seat, ready to take control of the vehicle instantly by grabbing the wheel or touch the brake should something go wrong with the system. The person in the passenger’s seat is an engineer who monitors the software operations on a computer.

Google hired engineers who previously participated in competitions and races involving automated cars — important turning points in the development of the technology, which has been coming into its own since around 2005, according to The New York Times.

If your first concern is one of safety, Google would argue that you’re going about it all wrong. Safety is one of the the project’s purposes. Google believes that the technology could nearly halve the number of automobile-related deaths because computers are supposedly better at driving than humans in the right circumstances.

There are other hypothetical pluses, too. The vehicles’s instant reaction time and 360-degree awareness would allow them to drive closer together on the highway than humans can, reducing traffic congestion. They could be more careful when operating the gas, reducing fuel consumption.

But the biggest benefit for Google would be the hour or so of daily commute time the car owner would save. Instead of driving, he or she could either be productive or entertained in the vehicle, doing work on a wireless Internet connection or watching television. Google doesn’t say it explicitly, but TechCrunch was quick to note that this time could be spent using Google products and absorbing Google-run advertising.

The most optimistic projections put this technology at least eight years away from market, though. Legal hassles are among the myriad problems; all of the current traffic laws assume that a human driver is present in the vehicle.

Do you think this technology will eventually be deployed, or is it just a pipe dream for Sergei and Larry? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, shaunl

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Tags: iPhone, New York, New York Times

Oxygen: A Desktop Network Connected to the Cloud

Posted on 25 June 2010 by Leo Pang

You may know Dropbox. It’s the wildly popular file storage and syncing service that is driving the geek set gaga. You may also know Box.net. It’s the Web-based file storage and collaboration service.

Now meet Oxygen Cloud. We’re not talking about a cloud for that cable network with a distinct feminine edge. Still, the logo is a cute pink. At least one fellow blogger at Enterprise 2.0 asked me if they were selling Oprah….in the cloud. He was serious.

Instead, Oxygen Cloud is a desktop file sharing service that combines storage and collaboration features in a cloud-based environment. It may sound odd to think of Oxygen as a cloud-based service on your desktop. But you can pretty much mix anything with the cloud these days. The desktop fits in a cloud environment as a symbol for the relationship between the Web and traditional work environments. Open the icon on your desktop or on any device and the cloud is right there. Dropbox has the feature. It’s a Nomadesk feature, too. Nomadesk considers itself to have a collaborative component so the combination Oxygen Cloud provides is not unprecedented.

But there is a gap in the market. Data storage and collaboration are not often viewed in the same context. But they are forces that can be networked together by using the desktop as an abstraction to the concept of the cloud.

Collaboration is still the hot topic. Any number of companies are working on developing services that provide sharing, co-editing, activity streams and associated features. Several popped up at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

On the contrary, we did not hear much discussion at Enterprise 2.0 about data storage and the amount of structured and unstructered data that is being produced. The amount of data in an enterprise environment will only scale.

Oxygen believes that bringing these forces together create a synergy that provided a place to oput all the dat an collaborate around it, too. The service won’t be available until later this summer so we will have to wait for it to go live before testing it out.

But we did get the chance to sit down with Founder and CEO Peter Chang at Enterprise 2.0 last week.

Chang says the Web is not really a place where the enterprise does its work. We’d care to differ a bit on that premise but we can agree that the ability to divest the Web storage from collaboration makes some sense. It may also have some value to serve as a way to mend the relationship between data storage and sharing.

The Oxygen Cloud desktop environment permits people to share files in an end-to-end secure network. Files can be shared in a virtual environment that is connected to a public cloud. In that way, Oxygen Cloud acts as a super broker for Amazon or other cloud services. The data is securely stored. But the people can see the content in the same place. It’s a method of packaging that can solve a few problems. It helps mitigate the data storage question. And people can share document in what Oxygen maintains is a secure environment.

Oxygen will also provide a do-it-yourself private cloud through a partnership with Data Robotics. Bandwidth is one of the issues with a service like Oxygen. The company says a private cloud environment may resolve issues with Internet latency.

Oxyen Cloud is subsidiary of LeapFILe, which provides secure file transfer services to the Fortune 500. It’s this pedigree that gives the service some additional strength. They are in a position to bridge that file storage experience.

Oxgen Cloud combines collaboration so it is not a pure file storage service. In that respect it is a bit of a departure for LeapFile. We’ll see how things look once the beta goes live.

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Tags: According Ina Steiner, Identity Crisis Saul Hansell, New York Times, New York Times Bits

Twitter’s Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Posted on 06 August 2009 by Leo Pang

Only 5% of Twitter’s users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report from Sysomos, the up-and-coming social media monitoring and analytics service, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots. Some of these are obviously spambots, though a large number of bots are also run by legitimate organizations, including @diggupdates, @imdb, and @dogbook, which posts updates from pets on Facebook to Twitter.

Twitter’s Most Active Users in Detail

Sysomos’s Alex Cheng and Mark Evans decided to take a closer look at the top 5% of Twitter’s most active users, and the results of their study are quite interesting. Most of them (60.6%) live in the United States, 6.9% in the U.K., 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada. 54% are male and 46% are female (on Twitter overall, 46% of all users are male and 53% female).

These active Twitter users also tend to have more followers. 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for Twitter overall.

Interestingly, a third of these highly active users only signed up for Twitter this year. About 72.5% of all of Twitter’s users only signed up this year. These numbers seem to suggest that some of the most active and enthusiastic users had already signed up for the service before it became the mainstream phenomenon it is now.

Who Are The Most Active Users?

Sysomos also compiled a list of the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers. Fox News (@foxnews) leads this list with 136 tweets per day, followed by Japanese BMX and mountain bike rider @mooris with about 108 tweets per day, and Hawaii’s Arleen Anderson (@Alohaarleen) with 101 daily tweets on average. Other notables in this list include Chris Brogan (43 tweets/day), Guy Kawasaki (39 tweets/day), Tyrese (37 tweets/day), and Tila Tequila (33 tweets/day).

Active News Organizations on Twitter

While Fox News is clearly the most active news organization on Twitter (though 136 tweets/day might be slightly overwhelming), the New York Times posts about 39 tweets per day and Time.com sends out about 30 tweets per day to its over 1.2 million followers. With just under 29 tweets per day, Breaking News didn’t quite make the list.

More Info

Here are a few more interesting tidbits from the Sysomos report:

• Among the top 5% of active Twitter users, 48% have more than 100 followers; only 6.3% of all Twitter users have more than 100 followers.
• 3.3% of the most active users have more than 2000 followers compared to 0.29% among all Twitter users.
• 88% of the top 5% post at least one new message every day – only 36% of all Twitter users do so.
• Retweets account for 5% of the activity from the top Twitter users – it accounts for 4% of the activity of all Twitter users.
• Active users with more than 1000 followers tend to have "Internet marketer", "Internet marketing", "business marketing" and "entrepreneur" as keywords in their profiles.
• The leading keywords for those with less than 1000 followers are "Web designer", "graphic designer", "love", and "Web developer&quot.;

Comments (128)

Tags: New York Times, New York Times Saul Hansell, Techdirt Insight Community, Timothy Lee

If You’ve Got A Platform Strategy, It Helps To Put Out The Welcome Mat For Third-party Developers

Posted on 26 February 2008 by Leo Pang

The New York Times Saul Hansell takes a look at the http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/the-chumby-is-open-but-not-for-business/">business model behind the Chumby, an Internet-age replacement for your alarm clock. Apparently, the plan is to keep the price of Chumbies low and make money by demanding a cut of any ad revenue generated by third-party applications. Hansell seems skeptical of this business model, and so am I. Chumby did the right thing by making its device relatively open and trying to provide a http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20041214/1837206.shtml">platform that other companies will build on. But its plan to demand a cut of other firms' advertising revenues seems like it might undercut that strategy. Especially when it's still trying to get the platform off the ground, it should want to make it as easy as possible for third-party developers to participate in the Chumby ecosystem.

Requiring third party developers to license access to the platform both increases the red tape required to enter the market for Chumby applications and reduces the potential profits from doing so. Potential third-party developers are going to think twice about betting on a platform whose owner may demand a bigger cut in the future. Obviously, there needs to be a way to recoup their investments on the Chumby platform. But if the Chumby becomes a hit, there will be all sorts of ways to monetize that success. Most obviously, the company can raise the price of the Chumby, or sell premium Chumbies with extra functionality. It can install its own applications by default and sell ads with those. It can sell accessories, or create a certification program for accessories like Apple's http://www.news.com/Apple-seeks-tax-on-iPod-accessories/2100-1041_3-5620959.html">"Made for iPod" program. It can offer seminars and consulting services to people wanting to develop Chumby applications. It's never difficult to monetize a successful platform — especially when you're selling the hardware. Putting up roadblocks to the development of new applications is a mistake, even if it generates a bit of extra revenue in the short run.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the http://www.insightcommunity.com/">Techdirt Insight Community.

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