Reuters’ David Martiste offers a look into Estonia, a surprising hot-bed of technological innovation. The former Soviet satellite has an upcoming national parliamentary election, which will be the world’s first major election to take place via the Internet.
Estonian voters will be able to use their chip-embedded national i.d. cards at PC-based readers. Estonian election officials tested the system earlier this week by hosting a “king of the forest” contest, asking people to vote among various animal candidates (moose, deer and boars, for example) for the king of the forest.
A local election in Estonia in 2005 also permitted Internet voting and drew 10,000 voters who voted via the web. For the upcoming election, experts expect 20,000 to 40,000 people to vote on the net, representing a tiny fraction of the 940,000 people eligible to vote.
It seems fitting that Estonia is pioneering this modern, and logical, mode of voting. Although one of the poorest nations in the EU, Estonia has leapfrogged ahead of other countries with its use of technology because it had little legacy infrastructure to manage when it broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991. For folks in the communications business, Estonia is best known for being the code-writing hub where Skype was developed.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:35 PM | Print | Comments (0)
The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney and Matthew Karnitschnig have this juicy piece today that divulges all kinds of insider gossip related to Google’s failed negotiations with Viacom to land a content deal for YouTube. However, the real piece of hard news is that talks between Google and another TV content provider, CBS, have ended, unraveling a potential deal that would have allowed YouTube to distribute clips from “The Late Show with David Letterman” and other CBS hits.
That deal also purportedly allowed Google to sell radio ad spots for CBS’s radio stations. (WSJ article is behind firewall but here’s a Reuter’s write-up of the CBS deal break-down).
But, the article is noteworthy because it offers some details about how Google’s negotiations with Viacom foundered. From what I can read between the lines, Google, represented in the talks by Eric Schmidt, kept changing the terms of the deal as it related to technical matters and how ad sales would be handled as Viacom’s financial demands increased. Google apparently offered an initial $500 million ad revenue payment guarantee over “several years.” Viacom purportedly raised this figure to $1 billion, although the company denies that.
The Google folks wisely thought that $1 billion was far too much to pay for content that would probably not generate nearly that amount in ad revenue.
The CBS deal fell through, supposedly, because Google was pushing for a five-year deal and CBS wanted a shorter contract. Moreover, in a clear sign that CBS may have a serious bureaucracy problem, “some CBS division heads were reluctant to sign off on a deal,” the article states.
Despite the failure to procure a big deal, the CBS and Google will continue to work on smaller projects together, the companies say.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:42 AM | Print | Comments (0)
It’s so disappointing when Wikipedia is wrong because it’s such a cool resource. But, the fact remains that Wikipedia isn’t compiled according to scholarly standards and one respected university’s history department has taken the bold step of banning Wikipedia citations.
The history department of Middlebury College in Vermont has decided that Wikipedia cannot be cited in papers or exams. Students can, of course, still use Wikipedia but they won’t be allowed to cite it as a back-up for their research.
The ban came about when Japanese history professor Neil Waters discovered that half a dozen students made the same erroneous contention in their research papers and found out that Wikipedia was the source of the error. This latest bout of bad knowledge was the final straw — other professors had noticed the same kind of misplaced reliance on Wikipedia by other students.
Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales isn’t bothered by this. He argues that students shouldn’t be relying on any encyclopedia when conducting research.
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, “I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:18 AM | Print | Comments (1)
He continued: “Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.
“If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll either.”
A start-up that debuted at DEMO 07 last month has an ambitious goal: to make video (and photo, music, text, web page) sharing as easy as possible across as many communications platforms as possible. Mike Blackwell, CEO of Nextumi, briefed me yesterday on the company’s new digital sharing solution called Share2Me.
Currently in Beta mode, Share2Me is a very simple tool. Sign up at the site and provide Share2Me with user i.d.s and passwords for your various email, social networking and IM accounts and the system will automatically retrieve all your contacts through these various online communications tools. Then, Share2Me’s logo will appear in your toolbar (either IE or Firefox) and you’re ready to go. I signed up while Mike guided me and the whole process took about four minutes.
Once you’re in the system, Share2Me allows you to share almost instantly via email or IM any video, web page, photo or text you wish to share. But, the coolest feature is that Share2Me allows the user to automatically publish material to MySpace, and in a week or two, Facebook.
The Share2Me tool skips altogether the need to copy, say, YouTube’s “embed video” or URL code if you want to publish a video to a social networking site or if you want to share it via IM or email. Nextumi’s Blackwell said that the company is working on adding blogging platforms to Share2Me too.
Nextumi arrived at the idea of Share2Me based on research the company conducted on the web-based communications habits of young people (ages 15 to 24). What Nextumi discovered is something we all know intuitively — young people don’t use email to communicate with each other. They use IM, Facebook or MySpace and, increasingly, text messages.
Young people also share more stuff than other age groups. But, it’s a hassle to share across different platforms, with code copying and what-not.
“People we talk to check their MySpace or Facebook five times per day and they’ve got IM up and running,” Blackwell said. “We found that they were more willing to share stuff more so than any other demographic.”
So, “we saw a big opportunity to make this easier for people. That’s the whole goal. Make it faster and easier for people to share stuff that they want to share.” Right now, video sharing is a relatively messy process when in fact “the person on the other end should just be able to get it” without a lot of contortions, such as downloading players, Blackwell said.
It is extraordinarily easy to share content with your contacts using Share2Me, but the system has some drawbacks. For one thing, AIM recognizes Share2Me messages as a bot and you can’t currently IM a video (or, I suppose, any kind of content) to this most popular of all IM platforms. “We hope to have that resolved very soon,” Blackwell, a former veteran of AOL, said.
Facebook isn’t part of the set-up yet either, although Blackwell expects that to be resolved in a week or two. And despite it’s ability to instantly send content to capable cell phones, Nextumi has to work directly with the carriers to get this done, or at least to get it done in a way that doesn’t cost the user a fortune in fees. “We’re getting popped for a nickel or whatever every time we send the message through and will do so until we have a deal with the carriers,” he said. That’s in the future too.
For now, Nextumi is hoping to give Share2Me some viral steam. In March it will kick off a “full-blown marketing campaign” that hits the youth demographic, which is not always easy. To achieve word-of-mouth momentum among the elusive young people, Share2Me has hired a well-known web-based “character” (Blackwell wouldn’t say who) to pitch the tool. Think along the lines of someone at the level of lonelygirl, Blackwell hints, although Share2Me hasn’t hired her.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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