Category: Tech news

YouTube has been dabbling with its own live streams for almost two years now. It’s live streamed presidential speeches, healthcare debates, cricket matches, and a U2 concert. But so far it’s stayed away from opening up live streaming to the general YouTube populace. The copyright liability would be insane.

Nevertheless, the shadow of YouTube hangs over the budding live video streaming industry, where startups like Livestream, Justin.tv, and Ustream are making their mark. Rumors persist that YouTube is planning to enter live streaming in a bigger way than it has so far. The screenshot above hints at what that might look like. I grabbed it from this YouTube help page for Google Moderator on YouTube. It shows the channel settings for a YouTube content producer (in this case, obviously someone who works for YouTube).  The last button, which I’ve circled above, is for “Live Stream.”

Max Haot, the CEO of Livestream, believes the screenshot provides”strong evidence that Youtube is about to launch a live streaming feature,” despite the fact that it looks like the “Live Stream” button is only enabled right now for YouTube employees. “We are not sure about their choice of name,” he adds.

The simple explanation here is that the screenshot, which was put up to illustrate a different feature (the Moderator module), comes from a YouTube employee with producer access to CitizenTube, the YouTube political channel that often shows live streams. Inside YouTube, that is the button they use when they want to run a live stream.

But the button is there, and if YouTube wanted to it could roll it out as a feature to trusted partners such as brands or politicians. In fact, YouTube is actively courting political candidates and their advertising dollars with all sorts of campaign tools. It would make sense to add live video to the mix. Live virtual town hall meetings could be very popular. Officially, however, YouTube says it has no immediate plans to do so.

Yelp is adding a nifty feature today which will make scoring a table at restaurant a breeze. The reviews and listings site is integrating OpenTable’s reservation system into Yelp.

This essentially allows any logged-in Yelp user to make a reservation without having to leave the site. There is now an OpenTable section on the Yelp listing page for all restaurants who are listed with the reservations site, which is currently taking reservations for 11,000 restaurants. You can then make an OpenTable reservation much like you would on reservations site. The feature is only available in the US only. Additionally, you don’t need to have an OpenTable account to make the reservation.

However, if you use the same email to create an Yelp account and an OpenTable account, you will receive your OpenTable points if you make a reservation on a Yelp business page. It’s surprising the feature hasn’t launched earlier; it’s certainly something that will be useful for all Yelp users.

The deal is part of OpenTable’s affiliate program which includes Zagat, Yahoo, MenuPages and TripAdvisor. OpenTable, which is profiting from its rapidly growing mobile business, has seated a total of 24.2 million diners in the past two quarters.

Yelp also released a few interesting statistics today. Over 29% of the reviewed businesses on Yelp are restaurants. And the reviews site just passed its11 millionth review and had more than 32M unique visitors in the month of May.

Yelp has had a tumultuous 2010. The company raised a large round of funding in January and was one of the initial partners with Facebook a few weeks ago to launch personalized experience (which unfortunately had a security hole). But the startup was hit with a number of lawsuits claiming extortion in March.

But useful features like this will only help Yelp become the defacto reviews and listings site and perhaps even overtake main competitor Citysearch.

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post written by Robert Scoble, who travels the world for Rackspace interviewing tech geeks for building43.com. He’s one of the most popular (stalked) users of location-based services and has 8,215 friends on Foursquare. Here he writes about what the location-based world could look like in 2012 and what might keep it from happening.

It’s January 2012 and you’ve just gotten your new Android 3.0-based phone. You’re going on a road trip so you start up the newly-released Foursquare. Gone are the checkins of 2010. Now you tell it where you’re going. This time we’re headed to Harrah’s at Stateline, Nevada. But this is no Foursquare you’ve ever seen before. They’ve finally integrated Waze, Tungle.me, and Yelp information into it. So, let’s discover more of what happens on our trip.

As we pull out of my driveway in Half Moon Bay we cross a geofence that sends alerts to the various systems that I’ve connected to Foursquare. Tungle.me knows I’m meeting Mike Arrington for dinner at Harrah’s. He gets an alert on his mobile phone that I’m on my way and Glympse sends him the ability to watch my progress so he’ll know if I’ll be on time. Plancast lets me know that four friends are attending the Black Eyed Peas concert at Harrah’s tonight. I see that Siri is offering to find me tickets, so I ask it to find me some tickets under $400 each.

Later in our drive, the kids are screaming. Hungry critters, they are. So, we pull out our cell phone and tell Siri: “we need fast food along the freeway.” Siri has already been tracking us as we drive along and it now contacts the APIs from Foursquare and Yelp and then compares both of their databases and quickly learns that we mostly check into McDonalds and In-N-Out. The system talks to us: “we found a McDonalds five miles ahead right off the freeway and there’s an In-N-Out eight miles ahead.” It continues: “If you want to try something else other than your two usual choices, or if you need a recommendation for the kids, let us know.”

McDonalds sounds fun, because Milan likes their Chicken McNuggets and also likes playing in their Playland play rooms. So, we ask Siri: “does that McDonalds have a Playland?” Siri runs off to McDonalds database of Playland locations and comes back with: “no, but we’ve found a location with a Playland 25 miles ahead of your location. Would you like to choose that one?”

After McDonalds we hit Sacramento and now Foursquare, which has joined with Israeli-company Waze, pops up with a new warning: “there’s an accident ahead and travelers in front of you are reporting delays of 15 minutes.” Up pops a photo of the wreck that an anonymous user has posted. Soon we find ourselves stuck in that traffic and so we start chatting with people also stuck in the traffic. “Hey, have you tried the Beatles station on Pandora?” someone asks. Damn, is that Steve Gillmor stuck along with us?

As we drive down the road we’re constantly checking into various things and places. We ask Siri about National Historical places along our route and it pulls up Wikipedia entries about what we’re passing onto our screens.

When we arrive at Harrah’s, we cross another geofence which lets Arrington know we’re here. It also checks us into Foursquare, and tells us: “there are 29 other people we know about, including three of your friends.” Then Siri (which received a message from our geofence) chimes in with: “are you still having dinner with Mike Arrington at 8 p.m. at Friday’s Station Steak & Seafood Grill?” I answer: “yes.” That goes away, but on screen is a Yelp review about that restaurant and I
realize that the attire is dressy and I only have jeans and t-shirts. So, I ask Siri: “are there any other four-star restaurants like Friday’s Station nearby?” It answers with a list from Yelp and then it starts showing places that still have spots left for us this evening by querying OpenTable’s APIs. Siri then tells me it has found two seats for tonight’s show at Harrah’s outdoor arena, and asks if it should buy them from Stubhub?

Since there’s a couple of hours before dinner, I figure I’d find a cigar shop since I have a feeling Arrington might like a good cigar since the 12th Techcrunch Disrupt conference was a huge success. Siri again finds me a place named “Puffin,” which is a short walk away from the hotel.

While at dinner, Arrington says he’d love to take the Heavenly Valley Gondola up to see the view. We make arrangements to meet the next morning to do just that and off I go with Maryam to see the concert. Oh, and Siri automatically checked us into the Pepsi Loot app, because we were in one of the official restaurants that uses Pepsi and that gives us free stuff for checking in at Pepsi-serving locations.

The next morning, when I walk out the hotel to meet Arrington at the Gondola ride I walk through another geofence that Tungle.me has setup around my hotel (it manages my schedule and knows where I am) and it sends an alert to Siri saying: “I see you’ve left the Harrah’s hotel, can you let me know where you are going?” I say into my phone: “I’m going to meet Mike Arrington at the Heavenly Valley Gondola.” It quickly brings back a link for the Gondola ride and asks: “is this where you are headed?” I say: “yes.” It says: “if you buy your ticket at your hotel you’ll save $6 per ticket; see the concierge.”

After I get home, Siri talks to yet more webservices: Blippy, to get my credit card statements, and Expensify, for expense reports. Siri fills out my expense report with details gained from me along the way. It knows which dinners were business ones, and which ones were personal based on things I’ve set along the way (in Google Calendar, for instance, I mark my personal meetings with a tag).

I can hear you saying “Scoble, what are you smoking?”

Seriously, you can do a whole lot of what I’m talking about (including saving the $6 on the gondola ride) today BUT there is something wrong: these services are all information silos that aren’t aware of each other.

I tried to do most of this scenario this weekend. What happened?

• I found out about the concert at Harrah’s too late to buy tickets.
• I found out about the $6 discount on the Heavenly Gondola after I had gotten to the top.
• I found out about the traffic jams after I had already gotten caught in them and didn’t know much about what caused them. And the system couldn’t tell us the best spot to have dinner based on traffic conditions (maybe if we had waited an hour and a half we would have spent less time in traffic).
• I almost got a ticket because I didn’t know about a speed trap up ahead of us. If more people used Waze or Trapster that wouldn’t be a problem, but Waze doesn’t know about Trapster’s users and Trapster doesn’t know about Waze’s users.
• We ate at a McDonalds that didn’t have a Playland. Siri doesn’t know about Playland, or that McDonalds has a page where you can look for locations that have Playlands. Our dinner date didn’t know we were running late because of the traffic jam (yeah, we called, but in the future they’ll just know exactly where we are and how long they should expect to wait for us).
• Siri, when it worked, didn’t bring us anything serendipitous because it didn’t know what people on Google Buzz were talking about. It didn’t know anything about how many friends were checked in at the hotel, or at places near us. It didn’t know that a popular concert would start in a few hours and that it might have been able to get us seats.
• As we drove along using Waze it didn’t tell me about historical landmarks. It didn’t show me where the In-N-Outs were. And when we wanted some coffee we had to switch to Google Maps to find Starbucks.
• When in Google Maps I turned on the Google Buzz layer and it showed me lots of Buzzes from people but it didn’t try to point out important ones that might impact my experience. It forced me to click on dozens of Buzz items on a map in an attempt to find anything useful. Ever pick up rocks in a stream wondering what you will find underneath? That’s sort of like Buzz’s experience.
• When I checkin with the new Pepsi Loot, it doesn’t check me into Foursquare, Loopt, or any of the other loyalty services that are coming out over the next few months.
• If we flew into Reno instead of driven, TripIt wouldn’t know anything about my Google Calendar and couldn’t warn people on my calendar if our flight was late. And TripIt isn’t able to check us into the airport even though it knows our plane landed.
• Yahoo news didn’t know that we left Half Moon Bay, so didn’t know that it should bring us news about Stateline, Nevada.
• Gilt didn’t warn my wife when we passed by the outlet stores in Vacaville that there were some great deals on purses she was considering.
• Paypal or Square weren’t able to be used for anything on our trip.

So, who are the winners and losers here?

Overall, the losers, so far, are us. In 2010 we’re seeing more and more location data silos being produced. The most recent ones are Loopt Star and PepsiLoot. These new services add more of a “tax” and don’t really combine in ways to make our lives interesting. That can’t continue if companies actually want us to use location-based services.

The losers, also, are the whole industry. Everyone will see slower adoption of all location-based services because of their limited utility if this doesn’t change.

But more specifically, the winners and losers:

Winners?

• Apple, because it already owns Siri, which is the best UI for smartphones for interacting with the world around you. And hooking up all these different services will be pretty easy for them to do over the next 18 months.
• Google, because it already has so much location and scheduling data and is gathering more every day.
• Facebook, because it already has so much data about people that it can use to present location information to us and can sell access to that data to others, like Apple, who will use it to augment their experiences.
• SimpleGeo, because they are becoming an arbitrage system for moving data in real time between all of these players. That should be monetizable in the way that Twitter is selling data streams to Google and Microsoft.

Losers?

• Yahoo, because they haven’t yet figured out how to get us to share much location data with it.
• Microsoft, because it is locked out of most of this new world too.
• Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, because they haven’t made any moves yet to present malleable social graphs in the way that Foursquare has.
• Individual loyalty programs. The first ones, like Pepsi Loot, will probably be popular because they are first but others will find tired and unengaged consumers and will need to join up with bigger players to get traction.

Along for the ride?

• Plancast, TripIt, Blippy, Tungle.me, Expensify, are all along for the ride. They provide unique data that the others don’t and unless someone else comes along that provides that data in a better way than these folks do, I think they are safe for the moment.

Disrupted?

• Yelp and other restaurant listings could be disrupted in this new world where you’ll choose your restaurants based on where you actually are, what friends you’ve added to systems like Facebook, and tips from your friends (which are quite different from the crowd reviews at Yelp).
• Yahoo News could be dramatically disrupted. Today, I met with the Yahoo news team and talked about needing different news based on where I was (I found out about riots in Guangzhou, China, after we arrived there and Twitter friends asked us if we were caught in the riots?)

Commerce winners?

• Gilt, Foursquare, and Loopt seem to be aimed in the right direction by bringing users goodies for using these services. But it’s too early to say that one of these will be a clear winner in bringing promotions and offers to us. Bigger companies, like Google, with its huge sales teams, or, better yet, eBay, which has relationships with lots of small-town retailers, could totally change the game here.

So what could keep the world I laid out here from happening?

I’ve already caught wind of plans that Apple has to build Siri into a much more complete offering. You’ll be able to talk to your iPhone that will come out next year (Siri is owned by Apple but won’t be built into iPhones in a serious way until 2011) and you’ll be able to do a variety of tasks from ordering a pizza, finding a taxi or a movie time, to recommending a restaurant to take your date to. But what happens if Apple ends up building its own maps, its own location checkin service, it’s own advertising system for bringing promotions and offers to you, its own payment system, and its own travel apps? Well, then, this system would happen for Apple customers but that would weaken the ability for other companies to compete. And that would force Google’s hand into competing, or buying, these companies up, which would keep Apple from having access to some of these companies’ APIs.

But Google buying these companies and integrating them together with its voice recognition systems is probably the best possible scenario. Facebook isn’t a mature enough company yet to properly integrate all of these into some sort of new business graph and make that all usable by 2012.

Some companies are trying to integrate these services, or provide infrastructure that makes integration possible as well.

CloudMade is using the OpenStreetMap to hook these services together on a common map. And the IETF is working on a variety of standards to make it easier for companies to interoperate with their location. If they can succeed, the vision I laid out of 2012 should be a reality.

[photo: flickr/pinto 2003]

As everyone on the Web knows by now, Steve Jobs does not think too highly of Flash and therefore you cannot watch Flash videos on the the iPad (or the iPhone). Apple’s position has stirred a lot of debate about how much video on the Web is iPad-friendly. It turns out that about two thirds of new videos are currently being encoded in the H.264 format, which is playable on the iPad, but media sites still need to either package that video in an app or in an HTML5 video player viewable in the iPad’s browser.

Streaming Media decided to shed more light on the issue by surveying 1,147 online media professionals about their iPad and HTML5 video plans in a report available here. According to the survey, 49 percent plan to support HTML5 video on their media sites by the end of next year, and 36 percent plan to support video on the iPad either through dedicated apps or an iPad compatible Website.

At first blush, these two numbers don’t seem to make much sense. If 49 percent of media sites are going to support HTML5 video, then by default they will also support the iPad. But if you drill down into the survey responses on whether they plan to support the iPad specifically, a full 19 percent wouldn’t disclose one way or the other. Add that to the 36 percent who say they will support the iPad, and you get close to half, which is the same as how many say they will support HTML5 video. What this tells me is that either there is still some confusion on the part of the Web video industry or that there is more support for broader standards like HTML5 video which will work across different devices like Android phones and tablets.

Other than the iPad, support for mobile devices goes beyond Apple devices. While 65 percent plan to support video on the iPhone via apps or an HTML5 Web video, about 40 percent plan on supporting Android and Blackberry devices. Again, the way to kill many birds with one stone is with HTML5 video through the mobile browser rather than developing separte video apps for each device.

Already, YouTube, Brightcove, and many others are getting on the HTML5 bandwagon. There are still standards battles brewing between the underlying H.264 and new Google-backed WebM codecs. (Just today, Google enabled WebM support in Chrome, for instance).

Confusion is not good for adoption. A full 32 percent of the survey “respondents said that the lack of a single HTML5-compatible video codec is holding them back from moving to HTML5.” But small companies are moving faster than big ones (no surprises there). Only 13 percent of media companies with more than $1 billion in revenues plan to support the iPad in the short term, according to the survey, compared to 30 percent of organizations with less than $1 million in revenues. I predict the bigger media companies will come around soon enough.

The Kobo is one of the cheapest e-book readers on the market today, which is an approach few companies are taking, opting instead for more features. Can a $150 reader stand up to the Kindles and Nooks of the world? I think the real question is: does it even need to?

Continue reading…

I’d like to think we’re pretty friendly with the PR folks over at YouTube. Sure, some nasty words may have been exchanged when they stabbed us in the back by disabling our handy video download tool, but I thought that we’d long since smoothed things over. Today, though, I found out how they really feel.

I came back from lunch to find a FedEx package on my desk, marked both ‘Urgent’ and ‘Perishable’. Intrigued, I opened it to find a white gift box and a note from YouTube PR thanking me for covering them over the last few years (they just had their fifth birthday). I tossed that aside and went to open the box to see what treasures awaited me… only to find that my hands were now covered in brown sticky goo. It didn’t take long to figure out that the entire box was filled with a sludgy mess. Were they trying to tell me something? Thanks, YouTube. I think.

It’s probably just melted chocolate (I hope), but I’m not going near it again until we test it on an intern. And for future reference YouTube, my candy of choice is the York Peppermint Pattie. Even when they’re melted.

Update: Here’s what it was supposed to look like, via MediaBistro. Pretty cool, actually — it features the YouTube 5th birthday logo emblazoned on the chocolate.

MG and I came at our EVO 4G reviews from different backgrounds. Even though I’m married to a  BlackBerry with a little Droid action on the side and he’s a self-proclaimed iPhone fanboy, we both came to the same conclusion: the battery life on the EVO 4G sucks. Sorry, it does. But that’s the state of high-powered Android phones at the moment. Both the EVO 4G and Incredible are in the same boat. The 1GHz Snapdragon CPU makes the phones a joy to use, but drains the battery in no time. It’s not entirely the snappy dragon’s fault either. Android users have been putting up with these type of shenanigans since the G1 debuted in late 2008. It’s really sad that the battery life issue still exists and users have to work around it just to use the latest and greatest hardware.

I read every single comment on my EVO 4G review with the hope that I was wrong about the phone’s battery issue and was simply doing something wrong. But none of the suggestions significantly improved my EVO 4G’s battery life. However, by doing a bunch of little things, I extended it’s idle life from about 12 hours to 14:30 — this is the phone’s battery life with everything turned off besides 3G and it just sits. All the tweaks are easy to do, but you’re going to have to forgo some of the more fun things about Android. It’s a shame, really, that a user has to give up fun widgets, advance wireless connections, and auto setting just to squeeze a few more hours from their phone.

When Google unveiled the WebM project at Google I/O a few weeks ago, one partner’s browser support was notably absent: Google’s. Sure, they added VP8/WebM support to Chromium, the open-source browser behind Chrome, but that flavor is used by a small fraction of the people who use Chrome itself. Starting today, Google is finally joining Firefox and Opera with WebM support in Chrome itself.

As they note on the Google Chrome Releases blog, WebM and VP8 (the actual video codec) has been added to the dev channel of Chrome across Windows, Mac, and Linux. While it’s not yet in the beta or stable builds of the browser, it will probably be added there very soon, once it’s proven to work in the dev build (which you can download here).

And it is working. YouTube is one of the first sites with videos that support WebM, and anyone with a browser that also supports it can start watching the videos now. Simply go to the YouTube HTML5 page and opt-in to be a tester. One you do this, search for a video and add “&webm=1″ to the end of the URL to return WebM videos.

When you start playing one, you’ll know it’s working if you see the “HTML5 – WEBM” notation in the lower bar. The videos also works great in HD and when expanded to full screen mode.

So, WebM is now ready to roll in Chrome, now Google just has to worry about those pesky patent lawsuits.

We had huge response yesterday and I’m pleased to report that it was a rousing success. Today is the final contest and it’s a big one. It’s open to entrants worldwide, so even if you live in Brussels or Burkina Faso, feel free to enter.

The details, again: HP and Dolby would like to give you one of three HP Pavilion dv6t Select Edition laptops complete with Blu-Ray player and Dolby Advanced Audio. Here are the details:

To celebrate HP’s recent launch of its new Pavilion laptops all of which include Dolby Advanced Audio for providing stunning audio, Dolby is giving away three Ultimate Dolby PC Entertainment Packages for enjoying surround sound entertainment. Included in each package:
· HP Pavilion dv6t Select Edition with Dolby Advanced Audio and Blu-ray playback
· The Hangover and Star Trek on Blu-ray featuring Dolby TrueHD loseless audio
· Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus with Dolby Digital 5.1 Creator – the ultimate tool for creating the perfect movies and videos
Dolby Advanced Audio gives new Pavilion users a personal surround sound experience with any set of headphones and will enhance their music, movies and games with a suite of technologies designed to provide the best listening experience from their PC.

What do you do to win? It’s so simple even a child to could do it.

Two months after its launch, there are no shortage of RSS readers for the iPad. But I’ve tried most of them, and still find them all lacking in some way. In fact, the one I’m still using the most is not optimized for the iPad at all — Reeder. As we noted back in March, with the 2.0 launch, Reeder finally brought an excellent RSS app to the iPhone. And shortly, it will be bringing an iPad-native experience as well.

The app was submitted to the App Store for approval three days ago, the developers noted on Twitter. That means we should expect it any day now. It will be a separate app from the iPhone version and will carry a new, slightly higher price, $4.99. But judging from the pictures below, and one stellar preview from MacStories, it will be worth it.

Below, find some screenshots of what it will look like. One nice touch is that sets of feeds can be drilled into using the pinch gesture, similar to the way you unbundle pictures in the iPad’s photo app. It’s also worth noting that if you have a blog and want one of the big favicons to appear, you should put a 120×120 apple-touch-icon.png file on your server.

If you spend any more than a few minutes a day on the Internet, you’ve probably already heard the story of Giorgio G.: Upset with AT&T about his iPhone eligibility dates, he e-mails the company’s CEO. A few days later, he e-mails again for a different (albeit related) matter. Within a few days, AT&T responds… with a threat to send him a formal cease & desist letter unless he stops e-mailing the CEO.

‘Twas the voicemail heard around the blogosphere. Within a few hours, just about every gadget-oriented blog and news network had mentioned it, none of them too happy. Undoubtedly looking to save a bit of face in the situation, AT&T has publicly apologized to Giorgio.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

TechCrunch has always been a distributed company. we have employees and contractors all around the world – Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, Chicago, Japan, China, London, Brussels (lol), Paris and Tel Aviv. I think one of the CrunchGear guys lives in Detroit or Reno, but I’m not sure and WE try not to associate with them much.

But our headquarters has always been in Palo Alto, the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. For the first four years of TechCrunch, since June 11, 2005, we worked out of my home near Palo Alto, California. That was a great place for our small company, and the commute from my bedroom to “the office” was about ten feet. We threw some epic parties there, the biggest topping 600 people (remind me to tell you the story about the drunk venture capitalist who lost his keys and slept on my couch – keys were in his pocket it turned out). And the occasional entrepreneur would occasionally break into my house and post video of the experience.

But that all ended in early 2009 when the city of Atherton decided they didn’t want TechCrunch in their neighborhood any more – citing some obscure regulations about how having fifteen cars in my front yard just wasn’t reasonable. So we moved the company down the road to downtown Palo Alto, in a beautiful little building on Lytton and Bryant.

But we knew it would be short term. As nice as the building is, it lacks some essential structural reinforcement that effectively turns it into a death trap in an earthquake. So they’re tearing it down and we needed to find a new home.

And boy does the Palo Alto business real estate market suck right now. Our rent would be doubling for a space the same size but not as nice. Meanwhile, San Francisco is less than half the cost of Palo Alto right now for office space. And most of our team actually lives in San Francisco anyway.

So as of next week we’re moving. Our new building is at 410 Townsend . We’ve doubled our space and have a massive new video studio to build out TechCrunch TV. The train station is two blocks away, an easy way to get back down to Palo Alto.

We’ll have an event at our new place shortly. I’ll even fly down from my secret undisclosed location in Seattle to attend. See you soon.

In the wake of the backlash it faced following its announcements at f8, Facebook has been doing everything it can to reinforce its message that it cares deeply about privacy. Last week it rolled out new “drastically simplified” privacy controls, making it easier to quickly adjust your settings. And today the site is launching a new Page dedicated to Privacy and Facebook, which it says provides users with a “living resource” for learning about and discussing these issues. This comes in addition to a rewritten privacy guide and video tutorials that walk users through the new settings.

All of this is very welcome — education is essential to helping users stay safe online. But it strikes me as something that users should have seen before the privacy overhaul last December, when they were ushered into using ‘Everyone‘ as the default sharing setting for updates.  And again, before they were automatically opted-in to Instant Personalization. These new resources may help concerned users stay informed, but most people aren’t going to take the initiative to look at them. In other words, the damage may already be done.

Yesterday I showed you some of the new features of the new Windows Live Essentials Suite. What I liked best: a nice Animoto-like movie clip creator and a new tool called Photo Fuse that lets you take a bunch of less than perfect pictures and easily create a new picture with the best parts of each. Photo Fuse in particular is something I’d use constantly to create better group photo shots – see the video and examples I included in that post.

The new suite doesn’t launch for a few weeks, but if you’re a Windows user we can get you in on June 16. The first 100 people to email their full name, Windows Live ID and an alternative email address to [email protected] will receive access. Make sure to log in and out of your Windows Live ID before emailing to ensure it’s an active account.

Jack Dorsey’s Square is trying to graduate from cool party trick to global game changer. So far, the mobile payments service is far from the mark but it’s making progress. Since its launch, Square has delivered roughly 50,000 devices, according to Dorsey. The founder of Twitter has been a diligent ambassador, traveling to several parties and conferences this year (like last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt) to demo Square and answer questions on security, usability and how the tiny device will make money. Dorsey may seem like the patient salesman but he has serious ambitions for Square that include global domination.

In its current form, Square caters to a limited market. For the uninitiated, Square turns your mobile device into a credit card scanner, using a reader that fits into your audio jack and Square software. The device and the software are free, but Square takes a small percentage of each transaction (2.75% plus 15 cents for swiped transactions). As of today, the program only works on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Nexus One and Droid, but it will reach other mobile devices soon. Although anyone can use Square, its largest demographic is expected to be small US merchants, who need to find a low cost solution for credit card transactions. That slice of America represents a huge opportunity, according to Dorsey, he estimates there are roughly 30 million US merchants who make less than $100,000 per year, of this group only 6 million are currently processing credit cards— the remainder, or 24 million, are all potential Square customers.

Despite all the potential, the future of Square is uncertain, given the fiercely competitive world of mobile payments. Beyond the bevy of mobile payment providers who indirectly compete with Square, its closest rivals VeriFone and Mophie have showcased their own card readers in the past year. That doesn’t seem to faze Dorsey who is trying to position Square as a global mobile payments provider that will offer a wide variety of solutions, beyond its iconic Square reader:

“The next obvious move for us is Canada. But it really has to be tailored to the culture. Different cultures use different technologies for payments. Japan for instance is using all NFC, Near Field Communication Technologies, all over Africa you’re seeing a lot of SMS usage for mobile banking and mobile payments. Our desire for Square is to be completely payment device agnostic and network agnostic and really work with whatever the culture is using predominantly. Here in the US its plastic cards, as we start going to other markets, like Europe, and to India and to Asia, we’ll be taking on more and more different technologies.”

If Dorsey has his way, Square could be huge, or rather, the Twitter of mobile payments. As he explains above, he wants to create a new set of technologies that will allow Square to design tailored solutions for several foreign markets. A credit card reader is only a fraction of the picture. In our video interview, Dorsey did not give a time line for his grand ambitions, but in the near term, he’s focused on accelerating Square’s US adoption. He says it’s vital for the business to reach a critical mass in payers within the next six months. Can Dorsey’s Square conquer America and then take on Canada, Europe, Asia? It’s a tall order, but I wouldn’t bet against the man behind Twitter. See our full video interview with Dorsey above.