Here's a story I've elected to overlook until now.

SightSpeed, a company I really like, is launching SightSpeed Light on MySpace. I've been encouraging my friends at SightSpeed to shift more toward business and away from the consumer roots they grew out of. They've been making moves to business solutions, but this release seems completely counter to that and ill advised.

While MySpace is a large network, popular with the millenial set to be sure, is releasing a free service on MySpace a viable plan for profitable business for a company like SightSpeed. If this is a proof of concept release, to test out SightSpeeds viability and potential in the social media world, again, why MySpace> The business dollars for the future certainly aren't there. Why not Facebook where college and business people are found more and more these days? A free proof of concept on Facebook makes sense. MySpace just doesn't.

I got email this morning from my friend, SightSpeed CEO, Peter Csathy that indicates this is the first of a series of announcements. I'll be watching for the rest. And I'll be hoping for news that strengthens SightSpeed's offerings and potential. This one is, for me, unfortunate and a step off the right track.

SIGHTSPEED LIGHT TO LAUNCH ON MYSPACE
SightSpeed Brings V-Mail and V-Chat Widget to the World's Largest Social Network

BERKELEY, Calif.-April 22, 2008--SightSpeed Inc., the leading provider of Internet video communications, today announced it has launched SightSpeed Light on MySpace (www.myspace.com/359330835), the world's most popular social network. SightSpeed becomes the first company to offer integrated video mail, public video posting and free video chat for members of MySpace in a free, easy-to-use, no-download app called SightSpeed Light. Empowered by MySpace's newly announced Developer Platform (http://developer.myspace.com), SightSpeed was able to easily build, test and ultimately deploy SightSpeed Light.

SightSpeed Light makes video conversations with MySpace friends livelier, whether they're real-time, face-to-face chats or threaded posts created by friends recording and posting video messages.

SightSpeed Light captures and creates video messages as posts, creating extended video conversations that are face-to-face, but not necessarily in real time. These threaded conversations start with someone creating and posting a SightSpeed video of themselves about any topic. From there, anyone else in that person's MySpace friends group can respond and add his or her thoughts. SightSpeed Light organizes the thread automatically, thus creating a video conversation, all without leaving MySpace.

MySpace first introduced its Developer Platform site on February 5, 2008, beginning a one-month application development period allowing companies, including SightSpeed, time to build and test their applications in a secure environment before going live to the MySpace community.

On March 13, 2008, MySpace launched the public beta of the Application Gallery (http://apps.myspace.com), enabling broader testing of approved applications by allowing public installation. MySpace members can now discover and add new applications from a variety of categories, including SightSpeed Light, to both their home and profile pages.

"Bringing SightSpeed Light to MySpace provides users with communications functionality currently not available in any other form on MySpace," said SightSpeed VP, Marketing, Eric Quanstrom. "SightSpeed Light allows MySpace users--especially those Gen Y-ers who grew up texting--to use video just as easily as they use text. And, all without leaving the familiarity of MySpace."

As with all MySpace Developer Platform applications, SightSpeed Light will be able to safely access publically available profile information including a user's friend list, interests, photos & albums, video, as well as status & mood. SightSpeed Light will have real estate in five places within MySpace including:

• A MySpace application profile (users can "friend" the apps)
• Access to embed applications on the user homepage (inward facing--for you to see)
• Access to embed applications on profiles (outward facing widget--for friends to see)
• An application gallery listing
• A canvas page

"SightSpeed Light is a great example of the way we intended developers to use the MySpace Developer Platform to create innovative and useful tools for our users," said Kyle Brinkman, vice president and general manager, MySpace Developer Platform. "Our end goal is to enrich our users' experience through unique and engaging applications, like SightSpeed Light, and we look forward to watching the MySpace Developer Platform continue to evolve."

For more information about the MySpace Developer Platform, please visit http://developer.myspace.com.

SightSpeed Light for MySpace can be accessed here: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=359330835.


# # #

About SightSpeed
SightSpeed Inc. is the award-winning provider of Internet video communications for both the business user and consumer. The company offers the broadest portfolio of industry-leading Internet video communications services, including SightSpeed Light, SightSpeed Free and SightSpeed PLUS, the most widely praised consumer-focused video chat services, which turn a PC or Mac into an easy-to-use video phone to communicate with friends and family around the world; and SightSpeed Business, the world's first high-quality, cost-effective and hardware-free videoconferencing service for all businesses (including SMBs). SightSpeed's services are SIP-based and standards-compliant. The company's revolutionary human perception-based technology is patented and based on more than ten years of research and development originating out of Cornell University.

Founded in 2001 and based in Berkeley, Calif., SightSpeed is a privately held company funded by The Roda Group, best known for launching Ask Jeeves and PolyServe. For more information about SightSpeed, visit www.sightspeed.com.

About MySpace
MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media Inc., is the premier lifestyle portal for connecting with friends, discovering popular culture, and making a positive impact on the world. By integrating web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, music streaming, music videos, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities, and member forums, MySpace has created a connected community. As the first ranked web domain in terms of page views (*), MySpace is the most widely-used and highly regarded site of its kind and is committed to providing the highest quality member experience. MySpace will continue to innovate with new features that allow its members to express their creativity and share their lives, both online and off. MySpace's international network includes localized community sites in the United States, France, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden, Latin America, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Brazil and the United Kingdom. Fox Interactive Media is a division of News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) (NYSE:NWS.A) (ASX:NWS) (ASX:NWSLV).

(*) Among the top 2000 domains comScore Media Metrix, December 2007. For more information on comScore Networks, please go to http://www.comscore.com.

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First, take a moment to check out our Digital Library link at the top of the page. You'll see a link to the eJournal we started last month,

Unified Communications in Realtime by: Ken Camp

Unified Communications in Realtime
is a Realtime eJournal authored by Unified Communications expert and
noted author Ken Camp. This online, monthly publication covers a
variety of topics including fixed mobile convergence, video, wireless
services, VoIP, collaboration tools and more.

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On Monday Jeff Pulver hosted one of his legendary breakfasts at the San Jose Convention Center for people in the San Jose area. Since VON was getting ready to start, there were plenty of people around. About 70 people showed up for breakfast. Here's some video of the event.

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This morning many industry notables joined Jeff Pulver for one of his breakfast meetings prior to the VON conference getting underway

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My partner Sheryl and I are packing up and getting ready to head to VON.x in San Jose tomorrow morning. It's going to be an action packed week filled with activity.

Tomorrow evening we're having dinner with Andy Abramson and his wife Helene, Jim Courtney from Skype Journal, and James Body (Mr. Pink) from Truphone. We're really excited to get to meet good friends for a relaxing dinner before the frenzy of the conference kicks into gear.

On Monday morning we'll be with loads of friends as we all join in for Breakfast with Jeff. Jeff Pulver's breakfasts around the world have become the stuff of legends, and lots of QIK videos. The Monday evening we're going to be at the MAXroam/QIK/Global Roaming Saint Patricks's Day Party. We'll be taking pictures and plan on streaming live video from both events here. If you want to keep up with our live vieo from VON, you can follow stardustfcv on Twitter.

Tuesday, the VON event kicks into high gear. Jeff Pulver is doing his Industry Perspective talk at 10:45 or 11:00. Then I get a few minutes to talk about The Real World Impact of Social Media as part of the VONCamp Unconference around noon. There's a great panel discussion that afternoon, and then the VoIP User Dinner, VoN San Jose 2008 followed by Jeff's Party at Spring 2008 VON.x.

Wednesday morning I'm looking forward to breakfast with my friend Marc Robins.

We'll be chatting with lots and lots of people while we're there. There will be live video (GeekSpeakTV), podcast conversations, pictures and more. We've got so many friends and colleagues lined up I can't even begin to list them here. It's hard to specualte how much will get written here from the road because we'll be on the go all day every day, but lots of material to be collected and we'll share it as fast as we can. For those of you who follow, Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook, along with our QIK video or Seesmic are the best ways to keep up.

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Regular readers know I write on a fairly regular basis for VON Magazine. It's always interesting to watch friends move around in the industry. Doug Mohney is moving on to some new opportuinities, and Paul Kapustka is moving back to Pulvermedia as the Editor-in-chief of VON Magazine.

I love working with Doug, but Paul's another old friend I really enjoy working with too. I wish them both luck in their new roles. I'm sure I'll still be in regular contact with both of them in the months ahead. Lots of changes.

VON Magazine Appoints Paul Kapustka Editor-in-Chief
Latest Appointment Completes the Transformation of the VON Media Group

NORWOOD, Mass., March 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Pulvermedia Inc., today announced the appointment of Paul Kapustka as Editor-in-chief of VON Magazine. Kapustka is a well-known and respected journalist and editor, with extensive experience throughout the VON community from his previous work with Pulvermedia on the VON Show Dailies, and as the producer of the VONosphere news site. By working with VON Magazine's recently appointed Publisher and Editorial Director, Bill Sell, Kapustka's appointment completes the recent transformation of the VON Media Group.
[Read Full News Release]

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Given the insantiy of getting ten podcast conversations together and online here in the past 24 hours, I'm beat. Here's a quick video update as I catch my breath and we get ready for the VON conference in San Jose next week.

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If you're like me, you're stuck somewhere other than at the booming eComm conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA today. We're both missing out.

• Surj Patel
• Thomas Howe
• Lee Dryburgh
• Martin Geddes
• Bob Frankston
• Norman Lewis
• David Isenberg (Freedom2Connect)
  
• JJ Freitag (to talk about why VC investors are at eComm)
  

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Neptuny's an interesting company and several of their recent announcements have caught my eye. Here's one that tips the application services potential toward service providers in a new way. I don't have a current sense of how the target niche of smaller IPTV operators might react, but it's interesting space to watch as it evolves.

Neptuny presents ContentWise SaaS edition at IPTV World Forum

Neptuny, a pioneer of the IPTV sector since 2001, is launching ContentWise SaaS (Software as a Service) edition to enable smaller IPTV operators,Web TV-VOD Portals to take advantage of Neptuny's revolutionary predictive content recommendation system. ContentWise generates recommendations tailored to the individual preferences and behaviour of IPTV customers based on user taste and media content metatdata. Offering ContentWise on a Software as a Service basis, enables smaller operators to use the powerful features used by larger operators without investing in additional infrastructure. ContentWise SaaS Edition will be launched at the IPTV World Forum in London from 12th - 14th March 2008.

Poor customer retention caused by users' frustration from trying to find appropriate content can be a big problem for all providers in the new digital TV sector. To prevent smaller IPTV providers or WebTV portals from losing dissatisfied customers Neptuny have developed a recommendation system that allows these smaller providers to also offer their users content tailored to their preferences. Smaller providers of IPTV and WebTV-VOD who use ContentWise SaaS edition will integrate with Neptuny's highly-available fully redundant carrier-grade infrastructure and therefore do not have to buy and manage any additional hardware themselves. Neptuny also provide strong authentication and security mechanisms, in the SaaS version, to protect the provider's data and Neptuny will also manage all software maintenance and upgrades as part of the service.

How ContentWise SaaS Edition Works
ContentWise collects information from two different sources to provide recommendations. Firstly the system takes information from all users (previous views and/or explicit ratings) and recommends items based on ratings from other users who have similar tastes, using Collaborative Filtering. The rating process is based on feedback from users via opinions of content or their interaction with the system. Secondly it applies Content-based Filtering based on the content meta-data e.g. actor, director, producer. This is then put through a proprietary algorithm to come up with weighted recommendations for that user based on his preferences. The operator can also add business rules to this, such as promoting certain content to meet strategic marketing objectives or maximise revenue. The operator can base recommendations on the individual and hence giving each user an enriched tailor-made experience. This works especially well where there are multiple users in a household who each use their own account. With the SaaS edition IPTV and WebTV-VOD providers will be able to integrate their systems using the APIs within ContentWise. Providers will have their own ContentWise instance securely hosting their data at Neptuny's data centres which enables them to provide real-time recommendations and target advertising.

Fabio Violante, Neptuny CEO, comments: "We think that this new ContentWise SaaS edition perfectly meets the needs of small IPTV and WebTV-VOD providers. Our scope when developing the product was to enable the smallest operators to provide the same rich set of features that big operators offer their customers. This is exactly what the new edition of ContentWise does."

Key Features

• Recommendations - ContentWise can make recommendations for VOD and nVOD content, TV Channels, TV programs and programs for Personal Video Recorder as well as suggestions for targeted advertising. The system will provide each user with a personalised view ensuring that the content they would want to see is easy to find as well as helping the operator source the right content for them.
• Rating Process - ContentWise collects feedback from the user. The user can either rate a film after watching it or the system will collect information about whether the user watched the whole film or stopped it before it has finished. This will then be used to recommend content to other users who have similar taste as well as helping the operator decide what content to buy.
• Advanced "Business Rules" - Operators can add additional filtering to the recommendations; these can include parental control filters to stop adult content being viewed as well as advertising based on a customer's profile. The operator can also recommend certain content which they need to push by adding ad-hoc business rules.
• Business Reporting - ContentWise offers online and offline reporting; these reports can assist the operator in content buying by analysing what their customers would like to purchase as well as feedback from the users experience so that the operator can enhance their service to increase customer satisfaction.
• Easy Implementation - Contentwise SaaS Edition integrates with the providers system using APIs. Providers will have their own ContentWise instance holding their data, which will be hosted by Neptuny. The IPTV provider will not have to buy and manage any additional hardware themselves as well as manage all software maintenance and upgrades. Neptuny will also provide strong authentication and security mechanisms to protect the provider's data as part of the service.

At the IPTV World Forum, Neptuny will also be demonstrating Caplan-IPTV Edition and ToughStream Server. Caplan-IPTV edition isa decision support, reporting and capacity-planning platform that enables proactive decision-making in IPTV ecosystems based on real data. The ToughStream Server, jointly developed by Neptuny and Digital Fountain, is the IPTV Industry's first stand-alone server solution for improving Quality of Service. The server-based software solution dramatically improves quality of service for IPTV providers. ToughStream Server™ is a stand-alone, enterprise class software solution that can be installed on a standard server within an operators IPTV head-end, protecting the entire network against packet loss, the leading cause of IPTV customer complaints.

About Neptuny (www.neptuny.com)
Neptuny is the technology leader in providing IT data correlation solutions to both large-scale data centre operators and IPTV service providers. For nearly a decade our solutions have been unique in analyzing four data sources (business, network, operation and configuration). Getting the most accurate, detailed modelling and forecasting available enables our customers to make better-informed business decisions.

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I realized this morning that next week it's time to start getting things ready to head down to San Jose for Spring VON.x. Sheryl and I are both really excited about this conference. It's a chance to see some great personal friends and colleagues. They're people we talk with all the time, but never seem to get to spend enough real-life time with. Beyond that, we'll be talking with some of the thought leaders in unified communications - the real movers and shakers in the industry.

We arrive in San Jose on Sunday, so we have some time to get ourselves situated before things kick into high gear. We're looking forward to dinner Sunday evening with our close friend Andy Abramson and his wife Helene. That's been our plan for a while. It will be the first time Helene and Sheryl get to meet. I think Andy and I will have to plan our shopping defensive strategy when the two of them get together.

On Monday morning, we're going to start with a bang. Jeff Pulver is holding one of his famous Breakfast with Jeff get togethers as part of the conference. On Monday, Sheryl and I will also be doing some live GeekSpeakTV with other friends. We know we have Pat Phelan from MAXROAM (a fitting St. Paddy's day guest), and James Body from Truphone on video. That evening the gang from MAXROAM, QIK, and Global Roaming are having a party that's sure to be a blast. We anticipate live streaming video from that event as well. And before the party we're meeting a bunch of friends for the VoIP User Dinner. Monday's going to be a long day.

Tuesday is shaping up to be a full day. We'll be meeting with folks from Intelliverse and Agito Networks at some point. We can't miss Jeff's opening talk on the future. And then there's the VONCamp Unconference. Sometime in the Unconference opening times, I'll e doing a brief talk on the Real Life Impact of Social Media. That's a surprise-filled talk that's sure to get some unexpected attention at the conference. The exhibit hall reception event in the evening will

Tuesday evening is Jeff's big all-conference party. He told us yesterday that The Herding Cats will be performing, as they often do at VON conferences. Tuesday will be another long and frenzied day.

On Wednesday, we'll doubtless pick up a couple of briefings in the morning, but we're on an early afternoon flight back home. I'm sure we'll be exhausted. We'll have load of blog posts, podcasts and video from the VON conference and we're ready to hit the road!




Technorati Tags: VON.x, VON Conference

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