Category: Tech news

This year we will spend $25 billion buying clothes and accessories online. Which is not to say we will enjoy doing it. Most big shopping sites are ugly, poorly designed and completely clueless when it comes to showing you clothes you might actually like. 

Google, the bastion of search, is hoping to change all that. Boutiques.com is designed to not only make it easier to find clothes you like, but to actually predict what those clothes will be.

The site is organized into a series of “boutiques,” which aggregate clothing from more than 250 designers and online stores. The online pages are curated by bloggers, fashion people, actresses (or their stylists), designers and, to a degree, you. 

The visual-search technology behind the online fashion aggregators teach the computer how to “look” for clothes in your style, setting Boutiques.com apart from other online shopping sites like ShopStyle, and Net-A-Porter.

While the boutiques are interesting, it’s the potential of the visual-search technology to make online shopping an intuitive experience that stands out. The idea is that the machine will know what you want before you do. This is particularly exciting to those of us masochistic enough to insist on having specific items in mind when we look for clothes. 

Keyword searches work well when shopping for a new camera. But using them to look for a new pair of jeans will often yield results that are incomplete or just plain wrong. Ladies, how many times have you searched for kitten heels and gotten kittens instead?

Theoretically, with visual search, the computer can recognize not just that a dress is short and blue, but also that it has a sailor collar and cap sleeves.

The people who make these classifications at Google are a team of fashion bloggers, journalists, buyers and design-school graduates. These are the folks creating the site and fine-tuning the algorithm. 

The people who curate the boutiques are celebrities, celebrity bloggers and designers. They pick the clothes and develop the style parameters for each of the six genres featured on the site: Romantic, Classic, Street, Edgy, Bohemian and Casual Chic.

To decide which style category you fall into, Google invites you to take a style quiz before shopping. In the first segment, you choose between two images, deciding which you like better. These are not only pictures of the latest runway looks, but also queries designed to dig out quirks in your personality.

Are you ironic T-shirt quirky or meat dress quirky? Do you prefer a Cosmopolitan or a tequila shot? The person who chooses tequila presumably falls into the Street category, with Romantic rising — fast.

The quiz can be long or short, depending on the consistency of your answers. Once it took me 35 clicks to get to Casual Chic, and another time only 25 to get to Romantic. I decided to go with Romantic, because, well, I liked the sound of it. One of the best side effects of a trip to Boutiques.com is that everyone leaves having been bestowed with a style. And thankfully it’s never “whatever’s clean.”

Next, I indicated my preferences in specific clothing categories: I like dresses that are strapless. I like black and red. I don’t like V-necks or reptile prints. Which brings us to the main problem with the quiz: As with Pandora and other recommendation engines, it’s better not to get too specific. You invariably end up weeding out things that you might like. More often than not, we don’t like or dislike something because of one detail like a V-neck. Except for reptile print. That’s never okay.

The quiz complete, I was taken to My Boutique, a page populated by a collection of items inspired by my answers. The filters seemed to be working pretty well, as I specifically indicated I liked round-toed red shoes, not pointy-toed red shoes, and I was shown lots of round-toed red shoes and no pointy-toed shoes. That didn’t mean I liked them all, or even most of them. The filter is like going into your favorite store. It makes liking more likely, not a sure thing.

My goal was to find a dress for New Year’s Eve. The dress I saw myself wearing was something reminiscent of the shimmery sleeveless number The Little Mermaid wears when she finally gets her legs. Not something I would go into a mall looking for, but this was a mall powered by Google, the bastion of search. I was optimistic.

I typed “glittery dress” into the keyword-search bar, and I was surprised by how many contenders popped up. None were exactly right, but several were close enough to warrant a click on the Visually Similar Items button, an inspired feature of the site. Of course, you hope they will be similar in the ways you want and not in the ways you don’t, but there’s no way to tell it that. In this case, a lot of sparkly dresses showed up, but they were all short, something I had specifically indicated in my style preferences that I hated (their term, not mine). Apparently, the filters I set up didn’t work with the Visually Similar Items button.

The main problem of trying to do this kind of very focused shopping on Boutiques.com: It’s hard. In offline shopping, you manage your expectations. I would never go to the mall with the goal of buying a dress even remotely similar to the one worn by a cartoon character in a 20-year-old movie. Online shopping is more focused, which is fine if you need a TV or black socks.

When you’re looking for clothes, it’s much more difficult to find something you like even if you have every dress ever made to choose from. Sometimes, one dress in the flesh can be worth 10,000 images. And sometimes even 10,000 dresses isn’t enough.

I may not have found my Little Mermaid dress, but after some refining, Boutiques.com has the potential to combine the fun of offline shopping with the efficiency of not having to put on pants to do it.

With its large images and simple, logical design, Boutiques is great for browsing and stumbling into unexplored lands like Bohemian or Carey Mulligan. From cheap Forever 21 dresses to $3,000 McQueen gowns, all clothes get the same visual treatment. And in this context it’s fun to see how arbitrary pricing can seem. 

However, if they want people to actually buy clothes instead of just looking at them, they need to make some improvements. It seems to be curated for the young, thin and trendy. The fashiony boutiques are great (who doesn’t need an easy place to find Harem Inspired clothing?), but the people at Google would do well to include more practical and accessible collections for specific body types, ages or professions.

The filters themselves work pretty well. If you tell it you hate latex stilettos, you won’t end up with a ton of stripper heels in your boutique. However, you still get a lot of shoes you don’t like. Hopefully with time and more interaction with the site, it will get better at recommending flats you like and not just any old ugly flats. Whether people have the patience to teach a program a thing they already know remains to be seen. At this point, Boutiques.com is more entertaining than practical, but it’s a good start.

Someday, maybe we’ll have online shopping technology that makes it possible to buy a pair of pants without trying them on first. Now, that would be revolutionary.

When it comes to keeping a tidy living space, there isn’t much I won’t do. Taking out the garbage? Washing the dishes? Vacuuming? All fine by me. But ironing? Now there’s a wrinkle in my psyche that just can’t ever get pressed out. The tedium, the constant steaming, the ever-challenging cordplay as you navigate your rumpled garments. You pull out an iron, and I run.

That is, until I laid my wrinkle-wary hands on Panasonic’s NI-WL600, a cordless model that not only provides better, faster ironing than my years-old $20 Target purchase, but also the freedom of 360-degree motion that has me reconsidering my longtime aversion to the sight of a standup ironing board.

The NI-WL600 relies on a docking station that leaves a minimal footprint, even if you prefer to leave it sitting on the far end of your board. Three heat levels and three steam preferences are easily accessible atop the iron and provide for quick preference-changing for moving between cottons (high), wools (medium) and acrylics (low). And carrying the operation from your closet to the board is easy, thanks to the handled, snap-top lid that hooks to the underside of the docking station.

Aside from the accessibility that it allows, the NI-WL600 is excellent for all your basic, ironing needs. Straightening my cotton shirts was never easier. Denim jeans were a dream. The way the football-shaped head of the iron moves around and into the tiniest corners made removing wrinkles from a load of shirts — dare I say? — fun. That I could plow through my batch faster and without needing the kind of slight-of-hand skills that’d make Ricky Jay blush was a joy.

Still, these results don’t come that easy. I had to liberally and constantly press the steam button in order to get the kind of vaporization that smooths out the most stubborn of wrinkles.

This, in turn, means I had to refill (several times) the diminutive water tank, which requires a forceful snap-on in order to reconnect to the iron. If you want to change the heat setting, you have to reconnect it back to the dock first, but you won’t go too long without doing that anyway, since wireless connectivity means heat immediately starts lowering from the moment you remove the iron from its plugged-in base.

The water tank also has a few shortcomings. First, it’s got a tiny hole on top that makes refilling from the faucet nearly impossible, lest you prefer soaking the entire tank in the process. And since you’re focusing entirely on pouring into the water-bottle straw-size hole, you can’t keep your eye on the tank itself to know if you’ve filled it past the maximum level.

But these are relatively small quibbles compared to the freedom I experienced without having to play cat’s cradle with my old model’s always-in-the-way cord. And for only $100, it’s worth it to pony up for this rather than plunk down a lone Andrew Jackson for some rinky-dink brand. Once I got myself past the minor hindrances and imperfections, I had a wrinkle-free wardrobe of pristine pressed shirts and pants.

Never did I think ironing could be more than a boring chore, but the NI-WL600 has sure set me straight.

WIRED 360-degree functionality allows for increased range of motion. Steaming and wrinkle removal is top-notch.

TIRED Steam button needs to be constantly pressed during operation. Water tank is small and needs frequent refilling.

See Also:

• Automatic-Opening Trash Can First Step in Robot Uprising …
• Deep Fryer Creates Golden Goodness in the Comfort of Your Home …
• Burning in a Heat Wave? Let Mr. Dyson’s Latest Fan Blow You Away …

Are you ready to embrace the cloud? Gird your loins, for Google’s Cr-48 (or Chrome OS Notebook, laptop prototype or whatever else you want to call it) is itching to drag you kicking and screaming up to the cloud and into it.

Google’s Cr-48 is, as many Google projects are, a brazen experiment in laptoppery that’s so crazy it just might work. Might not, either. For the Cr-48 — or whatever it ends up being called -– is really a notebook only in the sense that it has a keyboard and a hinge which lets it fold in half.

The sell here is that the Cr-48 runs Google’s new and long-anticipated Chrome OS. Based on a skeletal Linux build, it is virtually instant-on and instant-off, and its simplicity is hard to overstate. That’s because Chrome OS really is almost nothing but the Chrome web browser.

When you turn on the Cr-48, it drops you right into the Chrome browser, with a handful of icons which are really shortcuts to web pages. Anything you can do on the web -– with Chrome on Linux, anyway -– you can do on the Cr-48. Flash, JavaScript, whatever, it’s all possible, but of course, Google would prefer you stick to Gmail, YouTube, Picasa and the like. Google’s services are tightly integrated with the Cr-48, to the point where you’re asked for your Google ID when you turn on the machine for the first time.

And be assured: None of this will work if you’re not online. The Cr-48 supports every kind of Wi-Fi, and it packs a Verizon WWAN system with a killer hook: Users get 100 MB of free bandwidth every month. That’s not much, but it can get you through the dead zone between Starbuckses. (Additional bandwidth costs up to $50 for 5 GB a month.) It won’t, however, do you any good on an airplane without Gogo: You can open a few cached web pages on the Cr-48, but mostly it’s a 3.6-pound brick when you’re offline.

Under the hood the Cr-48 has netbook guts: a 1.66-GHz Atom CPU, 2 GB of RAM and integrated graphics, all powering a 12.1-inch, 1280 x 800 screen. Battery life is impressive: at least 8 hours with the wireless on (because you’d never turn it off). You also get a sole USB port (for input peripherals mainly) and VGA output. And there’s a grainy webcam.

Sure looks like a laptop. But is it really? Consider the evidence: The 16-GB SSD drive is not user-accessible, and you can’t store any files on the machine. Want to type a letter? You’ll need to go to Google Docs (which, oddly, is not a default icon). Want to write an e-mail? You’ll have to visit Gmail. Want to view a picture or video on your camera’s SD card? Well, er, you’ll have to upload it to the web from someone else’s real computer: The Cr-48’s SD slot is nonfunctional. Remember: You are not allowed to access local files, period!

Hackers are surely going to start finding a way to mod these things to overcome their limitations –- I tricked the machine into downloading a Firefox setup file, but had no way to open it — but for now the Cr-48 is really more of a tablet masquerading as a laptop. It even has its own app store, already full of the usual suspects. Weatherbug FTW!

WIRED Caps-lock key re-imagined as a search button. Nifty instant-on capabilities. Beautiful, bright display. Epic battery life.

TIRED Useless without wireless connection; only moderately useful with one. Requires massive buy-in to the Googleverse. Printing via cloud connection to another PC is erratic at best. Touchpad — “it’s all one big button” — requires lots of retraining. Keyboard feels clammy.

See Also:

• Five Things Google’s Chrome OS Will Do for Your Netbook
• Chrome OS Netbooks For Under $400, Says Google
• Google Chrome OS Not Ready for Primetime Yet
• Google’s Sexy Nexus One Pushes Android to New Limits
• Google’s Newest Android Device Makes a Giant Leap Forward

Needed any more sign that Christmas is upon us? The annual Google and North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) partnership to track Jolly Saint Nick is back in action, starting tomorrow at 2:00 am EST despite the fact that it is already Christmas Eve in some parts of the world.

From the Google Blog:

“There’s one timeless question that we’re proud to say we can help answer: Where in the world is Santa at this very moment? Thanks in part to recent advances in warp-speed GPS technology and some very clever elves (elveneering?) NORAD Tracks Santa is once again prepped and ready to go.”

The kids love it (Okay who am I kidding? This is really cool). As of tomorrow young and old alike can visit www.noradsanta.org to stalk Santa as he crosses the names of over 6 billion people off of his list. And because it’s the all-seeing GOOG you have multiple “Santa stalking” options. Yes really.

Google Map — Open Google Maps and search for “Santa NORAD” or just visit NoradSanta.org and get past the language screen. You can also watch a Santa cam here.

Google Earth Plugin – If you’ve got the Google Earth plugin, you can visit Noradsanta.org and click on Track Santa In Google Earth.

Santa Mobile — Visit m.noradsanta.org or complete the “Santa NORAD” search on Google Maps for mobile.

YouTube –  Of course, Santa has a YouTube channel.

Realtime Search — You can follow Santa on Twitter at @noradsanta, find him on Facebook here and use Google’s realtime search for updates.

Apparently NORAD has been tracking Santa since 1955, hilariously because a telephone misprint in a Sears catalogue misdirected Santa hotline callers to a NORAD higher ups phone line. Google got in on the Santa tracking game in 2004 and partnered up with NORAD in 2007, bringing Google services like Maps, Earth and YouTube into the mix.

Okay seriously, does ANY tech company have more Christmas spirit than Google?

Update: For those in need of an even bigger Santa fix, here’s his privacy policy.

Image: Google

Back in October we wrote about JewelMint, a new subscription jewelry site endorsed by Kate Bosworth and her stylist Cher Coulter. The site represents the first vertical for Santa Monica-based startup BeachMint, and it’s apparently doing well — less than three months after launching, BeachMint just landed a new $10 million round, which comes in addition to the $5 million it raised last summer. The round is being led by Trinity Ventures, with participation from Stanford University and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Anthem Ventures.

That was fast. BeachMint was only founded in June by Diego Berdakin and MySpace cofounder Josh Berman, both of whom previously headed News Corp’s incubator Slingshot Labs. But the two founders claim they’ve seen “astonishing growth”, and they’re eager to use this money to expand to new verticals.

JewelMint is a lot like ShoeDazzle, the shoe site endorsed by Kim Kardashian. Upon signing up, JewelMint will present you with a brief quiz, which it uses to recommend a few pieces of jewelry based on your taste. Each piece of jewelry is designed by Bosworth and Coulter, and they’re available exclusively through JewelMint.

Buy something and you’ll be signed up for a subscription, which costs $30 a month. Each month you’re given a credit to use toward a single piece of jewelry, and if you don’t like any of the pieces recommended to you, you can skip and wait until the following month (you’re only charged when you order something). If you want to try it out, JewelMint is extending a special offer to TechCrunch readers — use the gift code Nerd15 and you’ll get 50% off.

Berdakin says that since launching JewelMint, BeachMint has increasingly found itself focusing on the technical side of things as it looks to hone its recommendations. “We’re sort of like a Pandora for shopping”, he explains, because the site tries to match customers with items they’ll like. This also boosts switching costs, because customers won’t want to leave their taste profiles behind.

Berdakin and Berman won’t talk revenue numbers or specify which verticals they’re targeting next, but they say we should expect more news in January. They also say that the company is going to continue to match celebrities with each new vertical because it’s proven so effective (they point out that Kate Bosworth and JewelMint have already been featured in numerous glossy magazines).

The company currently has a headcount of twenty, which it plans on doubling over the next couple months.

Group messaging has been something that has been pretty hot for a while now. In fact, it’s gotten so hot that products from other hot spaces are starting to pivot towards it — see: Brightkite. But despite the hotness, I’ve yet to find one of these apps that really hooks me. But a new entry in the space, Beluga, may just be my elusive white whale.

As first covered yesterday by blogger Louis Gray, Beluga is a service with a good pedigree. The three people behind it, Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport, and Jon Perlow, are all Xooglers (ex-Googlers). What they’ve built is a simple, elegant, and fast group messaging service.

The key may be that it works across several different platforms: iPhone, Android, mobile web, regular web, and text message. But whereas most group messaging apps seem to focus on the lowest common denominator, SMS, Beluga puts the focus on the native iPhone and Android apps. The rest are simply fallback options. And across all the platforms, they’ve able to keep the experience consistent.

“Our initial motivation was wanting to eliminate the pain of coordinating plans among groups of people on the move. We wanted to communicate with groups of our actual friends in real-time (and in private) from our phones,” Davenport tells us. “We didn’t feel any existing solution really gave us what we wanted, and when we got positive feedback on our idea from talking to friends, we set out to create the best possible app for small private group communication,” he continues.

And based on my usage of the app over the past couple of days, I think they’ve come pretty close to nailing it. What strikes me is how Beluga seems to fullfil the promise of what Facebook Messages is supposed to be. Again, quick messages in real-time across platforms. I really like Facebook Messages so far on the web (so much so that I hope Gmail copies it), but the mobile experience leaves much to be desired so far. Beluga nails the mobile execution.

It’s almost as if Beluga is like Facebook Messages plus Groups. Groups on Facebook’s iPhone app almost accomplishes this. But it’s too heavy. There are too many layers. You can post messages and comments and you can like things. Beluga is just messages. And Facebook’s mobile clients don’t have a good notification system for Groups. Beluga is all about notifications.

The other popular group messaging services are either too text-reliant or too complicated for my tastes. TextPlus is probably the best-known of this group. But when I load it up I see 30 things I could do, some of which are free and some of which cost additional money. I never know what to click so I end up clicking one button: the iPhone home button to exit the app.

GroupMe is much more simple and comes very close to what I want. But in my opinion, the service (which actually launched out of our first hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City earlier this year) is too reliant on text messaging. That can work really well, but I fundamentally hate text messaging. It’s ugly and it’s a giant rip-off. Also, if you want to send pictures, you have to use their app. I used it recently with a group of friends on a Vegas trip, and no one sent any pictures because of that requirement. (I also would have been screwed had I not turned on unlimited text messages.)

But Beluga offers up a few others things as well that the others don’t that I love. First, you have the option to tag each message with your location. Each “Pod” (the groups Beluga creates for your different conversations) has a “Map” view which allows you to see where everyone in the group is sending their messages from. This can be helpful if you’re trying to find one another — or just cool if you’re chatting from different parts of the world.

You can also set a time and location for each Pod. This can be changed on the fly by anyone in the Pod so you can keep using the Pod to coordinate different events.

To invite friends to chat in Pods, you can either use an email address or phone number (or name if they already have an account). ”We want creating a group conversation to be as easy as sending an email or a text message, but to be a better experience than either. Immediacy and performance are key, so we are primarily focused on native mobile apps (using push notifications),” Davenport says.

He notes that initially it was just himself and Zhang working on the app in New York City this past July. That’s when they first tested a prototype on a 12-person group trip. A further 45-person test followed in September. After that, they brought on Perlow as a third co-founder and CTO. By November, they relocated the operation to Palo Alto, and started sharing space with Quora.

Davenport says that they’re currently actively working on the iPhone, Android, and mobile web versions of the app, but they’re considering BlackBerry and the other mobile OSes as well. They’ve also recently launched their SMS integration through Twilio.

Beluga tapped Braden Kowitz at Google Ventures to do a UX refresh recently, Davenport says. And the work shows. But they’re still just a team of three for now, though they plan to hire shortly as they look into taking on some funding (the operation is currently self-funded).

[photo: flickr/Steve Snodgrass]

Video advertising service PixelFish has just raised $2.1 million in Series B funding according to a SEC Form D filed today. Combined with a $1.4 million Series A round raised back in February this cash brings the company’s total funding to $3.5 million.

Founder John McIntyre won’t give us specific details on the investors in the round other than to say they include himself, co-founder John Zdanowski and executives from AT&T and Microsoft. Floodgate will also be investing and VC Mike Maples (listed on the Form D) will be joining the PixelFish board.

In the same space as Spotrunner and Turnhere,  PixelFish helps businesses leverage video as a customer acquisition and conversion tool. CEO McIntyre says he plans on using the money to expand product development and and fund growth, “We see local marketing and particularly video exploding in 2011.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Travis Kiefer, a kid who worked brutally hard to get into Stanford, took time off to build a non-profit called Gumball Capital, and decided to raise money by running a marathon on every continent. It was one of the more passed around posts I’ve ever written with more than 1,200 Facebook “likes,” 800 retweets and RTing this actually made my username a national trending topic on Twitter for a brief period.

More important, TechCrunch readers donated more than $10,000 to Kiefer’s nonprofit. The deal was Kiefer would do something crazy for each $27 donation. Since he was going to be in Antarctica for a week, he figured he’d have plenty of time. And then he got stuck in Chile for three days. Oops.

I caught up with Kiefer from my parents house in Memphis and his parents house in South Dakota to hear how it all went. If for no other reason, watch this to see how much he looks like Kenneth from 30 Rock.

HoverMe, a new browser add-on, is launching to add contextual social information about who you follow on the new version of Twitter. After you install the add-on, which works with Firefox, Chrome, and IE, when you hold your mouse or cursor over someone’s name on Twitter.com, it brings up a window that shows links to that person’s profiles on other social networks and media sites.

For example, If I hover over my colleague Alexia Tsotsis’ name in my Twitter stream, I’ll be able togo straight to her Facebook, Foursquare, PlanCast, and FriendFeed accounts via the hovercard. HoverMe pulls in all this information via an API from Qwerly which pulls any profiles that can be found publicly in a Google or Bing search, including LinkedIn, Flickr and more.

It’s actually incredibly useful to quickly find contextual social information about Twitter users. Unfortunately, it only works in Twitter and exclusively in the new web application that Twitter rolled out a few months ago. But Hoverme’s developer Aculis, says that they are hoping to add a similar functionality to Facebook.com

Editor’s note: Guest author Tim Wu is a profesor at Columbia Law School and author of The Master Switch: The Rise And Fall Of Information Empires. He is also credited with coining the term “network neutrality.” Earlier this week, the FCC approved weakened net neutrality rules which were highly debated and nobody seems to be happy with. In this guest post, Wu tries to sort out who benefits and who loses as result of the new rules.

The new Net Neutrality rules put off most of the hard questions—but who does that help and hurt?

When government faces a tough decision, it has three options: “Aye,” “Nay,” or “Kay”—“Kick the Can.” Postponement is attractive, and the Obama administration’s 2010 Net Neutrality rule has transformed can-kicking, the traditional domain of small children, into an art form. In its rule the FCC has successfully put off almost all of the hard Net Neutrality questions that have been buzzing around since 2000 or so. It is a remarkable feat to write a rule that actually creates more uncertainty than no rule, but by golly, the agency has done it.

If you’re the type that prizes certainty and clarity (i.e., most engineers, business people and investors), then manufacturing confusion may sound like insanity. But welcome to law school: good lawyers know that uncertainty has a power all of its own. So to really understand the Net Neutrality rule is not to bother understanding the rule itself, but rather the effects the uncertainty will create over the next 5 years or so.

In simple win/lose terms, the effects are good news for the wireless (Verizon / AT&T) and Internet app (Google / Skype) companies, and, as we’ll see, something of a defeat for the cable industry. For users, the consequences are mixed. What you’ll probably notice most clearly is a sense of a growing gap between the wireline and wireless internet. The reason is that the whatever the wireless rules do (which is, of course, uncertain), they’ll have only a marginal effect on the practices in that industry.

Let’s look at how, exactly, the rule creates uncertainty. For years everyone has been wondering whether the FCC might bless or damn an Internet “fast lane”—that is, allow a firm like Comcast to speed up Hulu in exchange for cash. The FCC gives us, well, no clear answer. Instead, it tells cable and DSL providers that “unreasonable discrimination” is banned, and then hints strongly that some prioritization might be okay, but paid prioritization might be trouble. Got that?

Another big question is whether the FCC has authority to make the rules at all. After this rulemaking, that question will remain unclear for a good four to six years. We’ll get an initial indication in about two years (the length of time it will take for the initial legal challenge), but a final answer may require the Supreme Court to get involved. Meanwhile, if the new rule is struck down by a federal court, the FCC retains the power to reenact it using a different basis of authority (its backup power, so to speak). That will effectively reset the authority question for another two years. Isn’t law fun?

The rule is also, finally, deliberately unclear as to exactly who the law applies to, a question the FCC will decide when the time comes. Nor, importantly, do we know exactly what the Net Neutrality rule means for the wireless internet, other than it might be more lenient. Then again, the FCC makes pains to say (on the urging of Commissioner Copps), it might not be more lenient.

Believe it or not, there is a meaning to this madness, for we can predict the effects of the uncertainty. I suggest it will confirm present trends. The uncertainty supports a continued openness on the wired internet, while also sanctioning a wireless internet that is semi-closed and dominated by commercial content. In the language of my book, The Master Switch, the rules may slow the cycle of consolidation on the wireline Internet, while simultaneously speeding it up in wireless. At a deeper level it suggests a coming age of Two Kingdoms: an Internet experience ever more divided by whether you pick up your laptop or your phone.

Let’s see how this will work. First, the rule’s uncertain application to any would-be fast-lane is as good as a ban. The uncertainty makes major investments needed to create a complex prioritization system a dicey proposition. That’s particularly unhappy news for the cable industry, which has more of a fast lane to sell. On the other hand, as is so often the case, what is bad news for cable is good news for consumers. The rule may finally force cable to offer higher speeds instead of trying to squeeze money out of app providers.

Also unhappily for cable, but good for users, the tenor of the rule suggests that the FCC will be suspect of efforts to kill Netflix or other over-the-top video sites. There is, of course, no clear rule saying so, but rather a sense that this is what “unreasonable” discrimination is all about. It’s in the air.

In the wireless world, matters are much the opposite. To change current trends would have required a very clear and aggressive ban on multiple forms of discrimination. Instead, the uncertainty confirms a world where favoritism operates not at the network level, but at the level of the physical device, operating system, and arcane areas like app store placement. This is a game that Google, a staunch advocate of wireline Net Neutrality, plays pretty well. But it is Apple who is, of course, the master here. Notice that when Apple decided to block WikiLeaks, it didn’t block the website, but rather declared that the App didn’t meet developer guidelines. If, instead, partner AT&T had blocked wikileaks.ch, all hell would have broken lose.

The difference between wireless and wireline doesn’t necessarily make technical sense, but it is more about which Internet is a happier home for various business models. Discriminatory platforms favor old-school commercial content, which suggest that the Net Neutrality rule will probably foster a continued migration of commercial services to wireless. Meanwhile, the Internet that arrives on your computer will remain a happier home for social, advertising-based, amateur, and non-profit projects, like Wikipedia or, frankly, Facebook. Whether that was the intent of the rule is, of course, impossible to say. But seen through the mists of uncertainty and vagueness, the message is nonetheless clear: so much for “One Web.”

Photo credit: Flickr/Serban Constantin

Tremor Media, a New York-based online video monetization and advertising company, recently acquired streaming ad placement service provider ScanScout for an undisclosed sum. Now, thanks to this SEC filing, we know they spent at least $65 million on the merger.

If the transaction was all stock, that’s the purchase price. If the agreement also included partial payment in cash, that means the purchase price was actually higher that that.

Either way, it’s quite a big bet on Tremor Media’s part – the company’s raised just south of $80 million to date (half of which was secured in April of this year).

According to the filing, nearly $1.9 million of the proceeds was paid to one or more executives or directors of the merged entity.

Update: a spokesperson tells us the filing was actually slightly incorrect. According to him, none of the cash proceeds were actually kept by the directors or executive, but completely reinvested in the company. He also noted that the merger was “by far mostly in stock”.

Digital measurement company comScore recently released online video numbers for November, 2010. The company found that Americans viewed more than 5.4 billion online video ads that month alone. Hulu took the top spot, serving more than 1.1 billion ads.

Second to Hulu was Tremor Media, ahead of Microsoft Sites, Brightroll and AOL.com but a far cry from the leading ad network – the company served 477 million online video ads, and its viewers averaged 7.1 ads per person.

The top video ad network in terms of potential reach of the total U.S. population was … ScanScout, at 44.3 percent.

Around twenty miles south of San Francisco is a small city called San Carlos. Despite living in the Bay Area for two decades I know almost nothing about it (Wikipedia says it’s an affluent small residential suburb) but starting today, it’s special for at least one big reason: it’s home to the largest Nexus S in existence.

Last night, Google employees installed a giant Nexus S in the San Carlos Best Buy, sporting a 42 inch touchscreen, a working camera, and internet connectivity. Yes, unlike the giant Nexus Ones that Google produced last year, which just played a looping video of the UI, this giant Nexus S actually works. And it’s actually being powered by a real (smaller) Nexus S that’s been equipped with special video-out capabilities.

So this morning I woke up at the crack of dawn, rolled out of bed, sat in traffic, and made my way to the San Carlos Best Buy to get a hands-on with the giant phone. Watch the video above for my first impressions. Update: Uploaded a new video that is less shaky than the first.

The phone is obviously meant to attract customer attention, and from what I saw (despite the early hour) it was working. Like moths to a flame, I watched a handful of customers walk up to the phone and start playing with it, and even the employees seemed intrigued. It probably helped that the display was right at the front of the store.

Google says this is a test for now — depending on how well the unit fares in the wild (i.e., if people don’t break the screen) it may roll these things out to many more Best Buys, which is currently the only retailer to carry the Nexus S.

Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. (SEV) and the Tanfield Group announced today that the American maker of all-electric trucks will purchase its United Kingdom-based parent company, Smith Electric Vehicles U.K. for $15 million in January.

The company began its U.S. operations in Kansas City, Mo. in 2009. Led by chief executive Bryan Hansel, SEV is buying all of the assets and operating business of Smith Electric Vehicles U.K. and renaming its business there Smith Electric Vehicles Europe to reflect an imminent expansion.

The company is eyeing Germany and France, countries whose governments have embraced renewable energy and electric vehicles, Hansel told TechCrunch on Thursday. He also explained that unifying SEV’s divisions could help the company create, operational efficiencies and market synergies that will make it more financially sound and productive:

“First, we’ll have global purchasing power for a combined volume of key components like batteries. We had technical alliances before, but negotiated separately on these things. With this deal, we can leverage global buying power. That means something today, and will help reduce and drive out costs.

Efficiencies at scale will apply for our customers, too. We can offer them contract negotiations, pricing, terms and conditions, and global warranties [that are uniform across different regional divisions] thanks to the new structure.”

The $15-million sale will be effective Jan. 1, 2011. Smith U.K.’s current owner, the Tanfield Group, will retain 49 percent equity in SEV. This percentage is subject to dilution as SEV raises additional equity capital. Geoff Allison, the current managing director at Smith U.K. will retain his leadership role there. The company plans to retain the (approximate) 180-person workforce in Europe, and to expand it in 2011, Hansel confirmed.

Recently, SEV announced that the United States Marine Corps signed as a customer, adding a couple of Smith Newton all-electric, commercial trucks to its fleet at a West Coast training facility, Camp Pendleton, Calif to start. The Newton is the only medium duty (class 4-7) all-electric commercial truck on the federal government’s general services administration (GSA) schedule the company confirmed.

A Marine Corps website said:

“The consumption of energy to operate our facilities in support of our mission is a large and recurring cost in terms of both taxpayer dollars and drain on non-renewable resources. Dependence on fossil fuels in a volatile market and from unstable regions of the world is both a financial and security vulnerability. In recognition of these facts, the Commandant of the Marine Corps has set a goal for a 30% reduction in energy consumption by 2015.”

The trucks are currently being built at SEV’s Kansas City, Mo. plant and are scheduled for delivery to Camp Pendleton in February 2011. SEV plans to build additional manufacturing, sales and service facilities around the world in 2011.

The company’s U.S. customers now include fleets run by: Frito-Lay, Staples, Coke, AT&T and PG&E. All have replaced some of their diesel trucks with Smith Newtons, and use them on urban delivery routes. In Europe, Smith Electric’s customers include: the grocery business Sainsbury’s, and the shipping company TNT and several government customers through the U.K. Low Carbon Vehicle Procurement Programme.

Skype is still recovering from its massive outage yesterday, but it is getting back to normal. Instant messages still seem to have a delay (anecdotally, I am noticing that I hear the IM ping, but then it is hit or miss whether any message comes through), but voice calls are working fine. I know because I just spoke with CEO Tony Bates over Skype. He estimates that between 16 million and 17 million Skype users, or about 80 percent of the people who would be on the service right now, can use it. “We are bringing folks back on in a controlled manner,” he says.

Bates priority is to get the service back up and running and to make sure Skype does not lose the trust of its users. To rectify that, he is publicly apologizing to them for the downtime and will offer users some sort of credits, with more details on that coming out later today. (Yes, free calls!) This is the right approach, and reminds me of what Netflix does when its streaming movie service goes down (free movies). Although credits may only go to paying customers wh already have SkypeOut accounts.

The ultimate cause of the outage is still unclear (or at least Skype isn’t ready to talk about it yet). When I asked if Skype has ruled out a malicious attack, Bates responded: “We haven’t ruled anything out.” Here is what we do know. Many Skype clients on the open Internet act as “supernodes.” These are directories which act like a big peer-to-peer telephone book helping one Skype client find another. These supernodes somehow were overloaded and went down.

Skype had to put up new supernodes to make up for the outage, and did so by redeploying the servers normally used for group video and offline IM features. Those features are down right now. Pulling the servers from other Skype services seems like a short-term solution until Skype can figure out something longer term.

Whatever the ultimate cause, the incident shows up the weak spot in Skype’s network. Take down the supernodes and the whole service goes with them.

Update: Below is a video message from CEO Bates to users about the outage and what Skype is doing about it:

Update 2: Skype has another update. Now they say the cause wasn’t malicious attack, and they are going to give 30 free minutes of calls to landline phones to paying customers. From their latest blog post:

We now understand the cause of the problem and we believe it was not caused by a malicious attack. But, we are still doing a full analysis and we will provide an in-depth post-mortem.

Nothing can make up for the missed experiences, but we’re going to be sending our Pay As You Go and Pre-Pay users a Skype Credit voucher via email. The voucher can be used to give you approximately 30 minutes of free calling to landlines anywhere in the world.*

For our active subscribers, we will credit you with a week’s extra subscription service

When it comes to getting people to watch online videos from media sites, Google is still the largest source of outside traffic. Search drives views. But the second largest source of traffic is not Yahoo, Bing, or another search engine. It is now Facebook. According to a report on Online Video & The Media Industry put out jointly by Tubemogul and Brightcove, Facebook passed Yahoo in the third quarter to become the No. 2 source of traffic to online videos at media sites. (The study measures videos across the Brightcove network, with a focus on newspaper, magazine, broadcaster, brand, and online media sites).

In the third quarter, Facebook shares accounted for 9.6 percent of online video traffic. Google still towers above Facebook with more than 50 percent of the referring traffic coming from search, but that is down from the second quarter when it was above 60 percent. In fact, across all search (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), referral traffic to videos on media sites is down.

When it comes to actual engagement in terms of minutes watched, however, viewers coming from Twitter watch longer on average than people coming from either Facebook or search. Twitter’s higher engagement is something Tubemogul has been tracking for a while. But when you break down engagement by different type of media sites, you get more of a mixed bag. Twitter shares result in longer video views for broadcasters, brands, and online media (the orange bars in the chart below), but people coming from Facebook watch longer on magazine and newspaper sites (the purple bars). And Google (maroon bars) still beats both for time spent watching videos on newspaper sites. If you think about it, that makes sense since people go to Google looking for timely information, so they are more likely to watch a news video for a longer period of time coming off a search than, say, an entertainment video. In all of these cases we are talking about average time spent watching of less than 2 minutes, so it is all relative.

The report has all sorts of other good data on how different types of media sites are doing when it comes to online video. The entire report is embedded blow.

Online Video Report Q3 2010