Bebo gives free access to TV and music

* Jemima Kiss
*
o Jemima Kiss
o Guardian Unlimited
o Tuesday November 13 2007

Youth social networking site Bebo will offer free content from major broadcasters - including the BBC - and record labels when it launches a series of media channels today.

The Open Media platform will also feature programmes from the BBC, ITN, Channel 4, BSkyB and Endemol in the UK, and CBS, Turner, MTV and ESPN in the US.

Programmes will Include Robin Hood and The Mighty Boosh.

Companies can embed their own media player on their Bebo channel, including their own advertising, and customise the page for their brand.

Following the launch at noon today in London and New York, additional media companies will be able to add their content through a "self-service" system.

Content will be free for Bebo's 40 million users to access, and content companies will receive 100% of revenues from in-video advertising - something that Bebo hopes will be a major incentive over similar offerings from rivals MySpace and Facebook.

Open Media also includes content from web-based services including music recommendation site Last.fm. user-content channel SumoTV and comedy site Crackle.

Evan Cohen, the Bebo director of strategy and operations, said the platform was not just an distribution tool, but an opportunity for media companies to exploit Bebo to cultivate the community around their brand.

Media content spreads virally, finding those "hard to reach" younger audiences who spend the majority of their time online.

Although media companies might prefer to build this community on their own site, said Cohen, "the reality is that they are not able to".

"There's a shift from that very possessive model of building up your own site to the super distributed mode - 'let's go where the audience is'," he added.

"This is a natural fit with younger audiences who see entertainment as a form of engagement and self-expression. Their life is about expression and defining who they are.

"The foundation of the site is communication but we want to build on top of that a compatible and powerful service of professional video and music that users can watch and put on their profiles."

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November 22, 2007
State of the Art
An E-Book Reader That Just May Catch On
By DAVID POGUE

You’ve got to have a lot of nerve to introduce an electronic book reader in 2007.

Sure, the idea has appeal: an e-reader lets you carry hundreds of books, search or jump to any spot in the text and bump up the type size when your eyes get tired.

But the counterarguments are equally persuasive. Printed books are dirt cheap, never run out of power and survive drops, spills and being run over. And their file format will still be readable 200 years from now.

So e-book readers keep on coming and keep on flopping: the Rocket eBook Reader. Gemstar. Everybook. SoftBook. Librius Millennium Reader. The Sony Reader is in stores even now, priced at $350 and making literally dozens of sales.

Then on Monday, Amazon introduced its own e-book reader, called the Kindle. It arrives at $400 — reading material sold separately.

Are they completely nuts?

The Kindle is a thin, 10-ounce slab of white plastic, tucked into a leatherette cover. It’s not, ahem, gorgeous; it’s all white plastic, sharp angles and visible seams, with all the design panache of a Commodore 64.

Its slight left-side thickening is supposed to suggest the feel of a paperback book folded back on your hand.

The screen uses the same astonishing E Ink technology that Sony’s Reader uses. It looks like black ink on light gray paper: no backlight, no glare, no eyestrain — and no need to turn it off, ever.

That’s because E Ink draws power only when you turn a page. At that point, millions of particles are drawn into a pattern of letters (or four-shade gray-scale images) by a brief electronic charge — and there they can stay forever, even if you take the battery out. You don’t turn this thing off; you just set it down, like a book.

The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks like it’s been printed there, so reading is satisfying, immersive and natural. At page turns, only a distracting black-white flash reminds you that you’re not viewing paper anymore.

To the right is a screen-height recessed groove. What looks like a shiny bit of silver chrome moves in this groove as you roll the clickable thumbwheel beneath it. This is your cursor; the electronically controlled silver patch grows and shrinks to highlight buttons or page chunks on the screen to its left.

But the part that will really rock your world is the Kindle’s free wireless cellular broadband service.

Now, if you just splurted your coffee, you’re forgiven; “free” and “wireless broadband” have rarely been used in the same sentence before. The Kindle goes online using Sprint’s 3G cellular data network — the same service that costs $60 a month for corporate laptop luggers. The Kindle’s price tag stings less when you realize that Amazon is going to pay your entire wireless tab.

So the Kindle can get online almost anywhere — not just in little coffee-shop hot spots, but in cabs, in lines, in doctor’s offices.

There’s even a crude Web browser. It’s fine for text and graphics, lousy for Web layouts and useless for streaming audio or video. But with some effort, you can use it to get news, rebook a flight, monitor blogs and even check Web e-mail (like Gmail).

But that’s not why Amazon is paying your wireless bills, and that’s not why it burdened the design with a tiny, clicky keyboard. No, the real point is instant book downloading.

The Kindle store offers best-seller lists, Most Popular lists and a Search box. The catalog includes 90,000 books so far, including 101 of the 112 currently listed as New York Times best sellers.

That dwarfs the Sony catalog (20,000 books), but Amazon says that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Its goal is to have every printed book on earth available for instant download.

It’s a giddy thought. Someone mentions a great book — any book. You whip out the Kindle, download the book in 60 seconds and start reading it.

That fantasy isn’t quite fulfilled at the moment. There’s an endless amount of great stuff on the Kindle store, but not everything. There’s no “Harry Potter” series, no “Book Thief,” no “Inconvenient Truth.”

Still, the instant wireless gratification is intoxicating, especially compared with the clunky method of loading up previous e-readers, with a Windows PC and a cable.

The pricing is another breakthrough: Kindle books generally cost less than half of what printed books cost (and much less than Sony’s e-books). It’s common sense; why should a digital file cost as much as a physical object, manufactured and shipped? Most Kindle hardcover books cost $10, including “I Am America (and So Can You”), “Deceptively Delicious” and “Freakonomics.” Their hardcover prices are $25 or $26. Older books cost $3 to $6.

You can also subscribe to major newspapers for various prices, including this one for $14 a month. Your paper arrives at 3 a.m., Eastern time, silently and automatically, complete with all articles and photos (although without the comics, crosswords, ads and so on). Magazines are available (for example, $1.50 a month for Time) and so are blogs ($2 a month).

Of course, even at those discounted prices, it will take you a very long time to recoup the Kindle’s $400 price; this machine is mostly about convenience, not economics.

But if you’re short of cash, you can also fill the Kindle with your own documents and photos — by e-mail. You, or your authorized minions, can e-mail Word, PDF, JPEG and text files directly to your Kindle’s special address — including any of the 20,000 free, out-of-copyright e-books at Gutenberg.org.

Amazon charges 10 cents for each e-mailed document; if even that’s too rich for your blood, you can also transfer them free from a Mac or PC, over a U.S.B. cable.

This feature means that you can look over documents, contracts and user guides while you’re on the road — without a laptop.

The Kindle holds about 200 books. (As an author myself, I was a little mortified to learn that my months of effort boil down to a pathetic 800-kilobyte text file.) You can insert an SD memory card to hold thousands more.

All of your reading material, and even your notes, bookmarks and clippings, is automatically backed up on Amazon.com. You can delete stuff when the Kindle gets full, confident that you can download it again later.

Amazon says that you’ll get about two days’ worth of reading on a charge of the replaceable battery — or, if you turn off the wireless feature, a week.

The Kindle also plays audio books you’ve bought from Audible.com, although they have to be bought and loaded from a computer. You can even play MP3 files as background-reading music (random-shuffle mode only).

There are drawbacks, though. The right and left margins of the Kindle are gigantic Previous Page and Next Page clickers; it’s almost impossible to avoid clicking them by accident.

There’s a Back button, but no Forward button — a real drag when you’re on the Web or the Kindle store. You can’t read in landscape orientation. And you can’t change the type size for the Web — not even for the Kindle store, whose text is tiny indeed.

So if the Kindle isn’t a home run, it’s at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download — wow.

Even though most people will prefer the feel, the cost and the simplicity of a paper book, the Kindle is by far the most successful stab yet at taking reading material into the digital age.

No, it’s not the last word in book reading. But once its price comes down and its design gets sleeker, the Kindle may be the beginning of a great new chapter.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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By Stefanie Olsen

Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: November 15, 2007 12:15 p.m. PST





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Kids who are active members of virtual worlds are learning how to
socialize, how to be technologically savvy, and how to be good little
consumers.

That's according to a group of academics and researchers who met
Wednesday evening at the University of Southern California to discuss
the effects of virtual worlds
on children today. Of course, virtual worlds are still so new that
researchers haven't had much time to study their impact on kids. But
the MacArthur Foundation, a sponsor of the panel discussion, has
invested millions in research over the next several years to ask such
questions.

Doug Thomas, associate professor at USC's Annenberg School of
Communication, said during the panel that much of what's happening in
virtual environments is informal learning. In many cases, kids are
getting an early education with technology, learning how to be members
of a citizenship, and picking up skills that they'll need in the future
workforce, Thomas said.

The downside, he said, is the inherently commercial nature of virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz,
which encourage kids to play games, dress up online characters, and buy
virtual goods to decorate their in-world homes or avatars.

"If you're a parent, I would be much less concerned about things
like online predators or violence, then I would be about the conflation
between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual
worlds). Because our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of
this world you got to buy the right stuff," Thomas said during the
panel, which was being simulcast via video over the Internet.

The panel came together to talk about the promise and pitfalls of virtual worlds from an educational and commercial viewpoint. Virtual games like Club Penguin and Webkinz
have become much more popular with 6- to 14-year-olds in the last two
years, attracting tens of millions of members. Researchers estimate
that more than 50 percent of kids on the Internet will belong to such
an environment by 2012, double that of the current population of
virtual world members.

Educational value

Meanwhile, many educators herald virtual environments for their
educational potential because they manage to get kids extremely
engaged. Thomas, for example, works with kids in an educational virtual
world called Modern Prometheus.
He said the environment is useful for teaching children about subjects
that can be difficult to teach in the classroom, such as ethics. The
game allows the kids to play out scenarios involving ethical decisions
over and over from different angles, letting them see the various
effects, he said.

Most people in America still haven't even heard of virtual worlds,
but that's changing, said Julia Stasch, vice president for domestic
grant-making at MacArthur. This generation is the first to grow up
digital and everyone needs to be paying attention to what kids
themselves have to say, Stasch said.

"Only rigorous research is really going to tell us if a profound
change is occurring and what form it's taking. If it's true, there are
significant implications for schools, libraries…families…the economy
and even our democracy," she said.

Yasmin Kafai, associate professor of the UCLA Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, has been conducting research on
tweens in Whyville.net, a virtual world with a more educational
bent. She said kids are drawn to virtual worlds because adults aren't
supervising and they can bring far-flung friends in vast areas like Los
Angeles to a common place.

"Particularly for teens with a drive for independence," Kafai said.
"In (these worlds), there's a lot of flirting and socializing, a (play)
ground for what comes later."

Thomas said he was astonished to hear that a majority of kids didn't
know how to find Iraq on a map. But they would know how to find any
kind of map of Iraq on the Internet, he said.

"Knowledge is changing. It (used to be that it) was a set of facts,
now it's not so much a 'what' but a 'where,' in which kids learn how to
find information," Thomas said. "That's going to be the single most
important skill--the ability to adapt to change."

He added: "I wouldn't be worried if they're engaged and playing these games, I'd be more worried if they're not."

Still,
an audience member from PBS Kids.com asked the panelists about concerns
of cyberbullying in virtual worlds, which is fairly common in these
environments. The panelists responded that it's the dark side of
virtual environments but it's not much different than what happens in
the real world.

"Bullying, racism, homophobia, every cultural ill is replicated in
virtual worlds," Thomas said. "If you went to any sixth grade class and
studied it for a year, all the good, bad, and ugly shows up in a
virtual world just like every class, and we should all be mindful of
that."

The panelists advised parents to take an active approach with their
kids in virtual worlds. Thomas, for example, said that he would want to
teach his children media literacy skills so that they could discern the
difference between being a good member of society and buying stuff.

Jim Steyer, moderator of the panel and CEO of panel co-host Common
Sense Media, suggested that parents set time limits and put the
computer in a common room.

Kafai suggested that parents become a member in the virtual world
that their kids belong to and play with them. "Go into the world with
them," she said.

Send insights or tips on this topic to stefanie.olsen@cnet.com.

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November 8, 2007, 1:24 pm
Trust Among Friends on Facebook

By Laura M. Holson

Tags: Facebook

I was struck Wednesday reading Louise Story’s article on Facebook’s new service which would allow users of the social networking site to broadcast ads to their so-called “friends.” I think this new advertising push is going to redefine friendship on Facebook.

Here’s why. When my best friend Kathy calls me to say I should rush to Nordstrom because cashmere sweaters are on sale, I trust her because she knows what I like. But that’s not necessarily so among “friends” on Facebook who are oftentimes better described as acquaintances.

A case in point. I had dinner the other night with some pals and the conversation turned, as it sometimes does, to dating. In this case a woman had met a man she found mildly attractive until she was invited to be his “friend” on Facebook. It was a turnoff, not only did he have too many friends by her standards ­ 65 ­ but 90 percent of them were women. Worse, when she logged onto Facebook last Sunday at 8 a.m., she found her “friend” had already posted pictures from Saturday night on his page. Did I mention he was in his 40s?

“Loser,” said one of the gals at dinner as she tucked into a tomato tart. The woman agreed.

So here is the dilemma for a marketer. This man is the kind of Facebook user, someone with a lot of friends who likes to share, who would likely authorize a retailer to give information to his “friends” about his recent purchases. But it is unlikely the woman, who turned down his offer for a date, would buy anything he recommended. Instead she wants to de-friend him.

Ouch.

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