Nicolas Herbeault

Congress is finally understanding the reality of the Yahoo-Google search deal, and what it means for the state of search competition in general. It’s not about price fixing advertising rates, it’s about neutering the second place market participant.

As I wrote on September 27, the current deal between Yahoo and Google will inevitably lead to the decline of Yahoo’s core search advertising business. They will insert Google ads to push revenue. But as they do so, they’ll give advertisers an increasing incentive to just go to Google for their ad management. The disparity between Yahoo and Google’s revenue-per-ad models will grow, which will further encourage Yahoo’s reliance on Google. The result will be a Google monopoly in search advertising. And instead of competing for that monopoly, they get paid for the privilege.

By :Michael Arrington

CBS Labs, which has been testing new HD streaming products, has also rolled out a labs version of a new product called Social Viewing Room. The idea is that you show up to the site, pick a show that’s on right now, and watch it with your friends or whoever is there. You can comment, LOL or take quizzes for points.

Given how awesome on demand TV is, I don’t see this kind of thing being very popular. With one big exception: live broadcasts, which are by definition shown at a certain time and watched by everyone then. Apart from live content, it seems like asynchronous comments are a great way to go, as YouTube, Hulu and Joost have done.

ABC TV has apparently embraced the mantra of giving users content when, where, and how they want it.

Digital media industry expert and analyst Dorian Benkoil is the founder of Teeming Media, and the host of media business show Naked Media.

Written by:

Useful tools like this is very interesting. Songreference is a free download for iTunes (Windows only for now) and Winamp that searches for the music video of whatever MP3 you are playing at the time and then plays it synced to the song. That syncing part isn’t trivial, and it makes all the difference. The plugin also has links to Wikipedia information on each song.

Another one bites the dust is Uber.com, a fledgling blog platform that was backed by Discovery Communications and Universal Music Group, shut its doors Friday. And the reason is that,the investors pulled out.

“We have some bad news,” this is a message on the Los Angeles-based company’s home page read. “The crisis in the economy has claimed Uber as its latest victim. Our investors have decided to stop supporting Uber and we have closed the doors.”

Uber had been co-founded by former Friendster CEO and NBC Entertainment president Scott Sassa, and had completed a $7.6 million series B venture round this spring that included money from the aforementioned investors as well as venture firm Sterling Stamos.

With a focus on editorial content centered on highbrow art and media, including a Huffington Post-like “Uber Index,” and the slogan “it’s easy to create better,” it was tough to define Uber. Was it a blog platform? A social network? A discussion hub? The financial crisis didn’t help, but the truth is that Uber had never really taken off in the first place.

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that “crowdsources” language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application’s text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is open for more developers to use as well through OpenSocial.

Hi5’s own site is already available in two dozen languages.

One big player in the social-app space that plans to use Hi5’s translation code is iLike, a music service that has become popular largely through applications for platforms from Facebook to Apple’s iTunes, and hopes to see its user base distributed around the world as well as across the Web. Another is RockYou, the “app factory” behind some of the most popular applications created with the Facebook and OpenSocial standards.

“As the leading music provider on hi5, we’re excited to know that hi5’s crowdsourcing service would expand iLike’s reach internationally, helping music spread among fans from different languages, geographies and cultures,” iLike CEO Ali Partovi said in a release.

The concept of crowdsourcing language translations caught fire when Facebook started enlisting volunteer members to help with the effort through an application on its own platform called Translation. The Hi5 application will, in effect, do the same thing for the OpenSocial platform.

Google built OpenSocial as a universal standard for social-network applications, and has since gained the following of almost every social site except for Facebook, which continues to use its own platform. Earlier this year, OpenSocial was spun off into a nonprofit organization separate from Google.

Written by:Erick Schonfeld

If you’re one of those people who tries to grab his or her own preferred username on every new service that comes along, just in case the service becomes hot one day and you want to start using that cool ID, check out this new tool: Usernamecheck.

All it does is ask you for a user name, and then pings about 45 services so it can return to you “taken” or “available” for each one.

If a name is taken, it can’t tell you if the owner of it is you or someone else (how would it know?), and there’s as yet no way to add new sites for it to check–you have to wait for the developer to add them. Also, it’s slow. And it doesn’t appear to work on anything but Firefox.

But this is a useful tool for managing one’s personal brand. And here’s a tip for parents-to-be: Run your baby names through it, as well as through BustAName. Your kid might thank you.

Written by: Rafe Needleman

Randall Stross at The New York Times goes to bat for the Google/Yahoo search marketing deal, saying there’s “nothing to fear” from the two companies linking their search products. I believe most of his analysis is wrong, and he also skips the publisher side of the market entirely. In short, I feel that he is exactly wrong in both his approach and his conclusions.

He begins with “GOOGLE controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes?”

Well no actually, a monopoly controls only the supply side of a transaction, so it can’t change whatever it wants. If prices go too high, users stop buying (this is known as demand elasticity). Being a monopoly just gives you the ability to charge much higer prices that you otherwise would be able too because you don’t have competitor who can undercut you for less profit.

But Stross skips that analysis and jumps into the meat of his argument. Ad rates are set by auctions, not dictated by Google, he says, so Google has no control over the pricing of those ads. If ad rates go up, its just the market doing its thing.

Written by:Michael Arrington

We’re one step closer to taking down Automated Phone Trees once and for all. Fonolo, a startup that won the top prize at today’s GigaOM Mobilize Conference, provides users not only with a way to bypass the irritating and inefficient trees, but also a central hub to help monitor previous conversations for future reference. Fonolo is currently in private beta so you’ll have to hold out a while longer, but we’ll be keeping close watch for its public launch.

The site’s primary function is to let you skip phone trees entirely. Fonolo presents a nested path menu for each supported company, which you can browse through until you find the person you’d like to call. The service then dials the number for you, using audio detection in real time to ensure the menu hasn’t changed. Once it arrives at its destination, it calls your phone and immediately connects you.

Hidden on Twitter amongst the chatter about today’s lunch menu and the best spots for happy hour lays a mound of up-to-the-minute user generated commentary on just about any major topic. While Twitter Search helps you wade through this endless torrent of tweets from within the browser, Mustache Inc’s iPhone application Summizer aims to squeeze that functionality into a package more friendly with on-the-go use.