A big chunk of the new wireless broadband spectrum that President Obama wants to make available in the next five years would come from television broadcasters, who will be asked to give up radio spectrum slots for which they have fought and paid so that wireless data carriers can use them mostly for mobile Internet access instead.

The proposal would nearly double the available amount of bandwidth for wireless broadband, from today’s 547 megahertz to about 1,000 megahertz. (Don’t confuse these megahertz of bandwidth, which counts the amount of the radio dial allocated to Internet access, with the megabits used to measure throughput speed of a connection. “Bandwidth” is a popular misnomer for connection speed rather than actual wireless radio band width.)

Obama’s Presidential memorandum issued today, “Unleashing the Wireless Broadband Revolution,” could just as well be called, “Taking Back Lots of Wireless Spectrum Assignments.” Obama’s proposal is based on the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, a wonky but pragmatic proposal to reassign 300 megahertz’ worth of bandwidth between now and 2015.

The Obama administration wants to make a full 500 megahertz of bandwidth available for auction to companies that would use it for wireless broadband data connections for consumers and possibly first-responder networks. About 120 megahertz would come from broadcast TV. Administration officials told The New York Times that around 45 percent, or 225 megahertz, would come from various government spectrum blocks that are used lightly or not at all.

The FCC’s plan comes with a footnote: “Timing and quantity depends on Congressional action to grant incentive auction authority as well as voluntary participation of broadcasters in an auction.” Broadcasters, represented by the National Association of Broadcasters, may not be too voluntary about participating. They’ve complained that the government’s most recent spectrum auctions took parts of the airwaves that had been reclaimed by disabling traditional analog TV broadcasts, and sold these radio frequencies to buyers who are now “warehousing” it, i.e. letting it lie idle rather than developing new consumer services. An NAB spokesman told The New York Times that broadcasters hope “further reclamation of broadcast television spectrum will be completely voluntary.”

Tags: broadband

Companies: FCC

People: Barack Obama

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » MediaBeat

If  you’re not a heavy Flickr user, you might not spot the changes in the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service’s forthcoming redesign, to which you can opt in now. Click on the screenshot at right to see it full size. The old and new pages look alike at first, but there are key differences:

1. The default display size of photos has been increased 30 percent, from 500 pixels wide to 640. Newer computers with larger, more high-resolution displays are put to better use, rather than filling the screen with whitespace.
2. The entire photo page has been made wider and taller.
3. A light box few darkens the white pixels to black, much like Photoshop, so you can look at photos without being bombarded with white light.
4. Photo titles are closer to the description, so you can easily figure out what a photo is about.
5. The photo’s owner, date taken, camera, and geographic location are clustered at the right of the page.
6. There’s a map that shows the geolocation data attached to the photo. You can pop up the map over the page for a larger view.
7. The photostream to which a photo belongs appears as an interactive filmstrip. You can scroll it within the page.
8. You can pop up a map that shows the geolocation data in the photo.
9. You, and anyone else, can “star” an image to mark it as a favorite.
10. Other users can add to a Facebook-like stream of comments and stars below the image.
11. Navigation has been cleaned up. For example, you can now use arrow keys to go back and forth through a filmstrip.

The new Flickr is more of a major overhaul than it seems. Sign up for the opt-in beta test program, use it for two days, then try going back.

People: flickr

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » MediaBeat

Brightcove released a new software development kit today for Android applications that includes mobile templates supporting Adobe’s Flash technology

Developers will be able to design native apps that allow video playback, search and discovery or use out-of-the-box templates that play video using Flash.

“I’m really happy that we’re standing tall with Adobe as they release Flash Player 10.1,” wrote Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s vice president of marketing, who was involved in the development of Flash at Macromedia. “The last six months of rhetoric have been particularly bruising for Flash, and it’s great to see Adobe answering their critics with code.”

Brightcove’s move comes as it has to support a fractured market with a plethora of competing devices and platforms.  Android’s market share is on the increase, and the Google-backed operating system came to support more than 20 percent of mobile web traffic last month, according to Quantcast.

“We’ve entered an era where every website owner must have a strategy for the PC Web, Mobile Web, iOS Apps and Android Apps,” Whatcott added. “For our customers, it’s not about making high stakes either/or bets on one platform over another, it’s about a cross-platform both/and strategy.”

Adobe released Flash 10.1, the first full version of Flash to work on mobile phones, for download on Android last night. It says Flash 10.1 should be available on other phone platforms shortly.

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.

Tags: Android, Flash

Companies: Adobe, Brightcove

People: Jeff Whatcott

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » MediaBeat

Here’s the rumor roundup up on prominent startup blog TechCrunch and founder-editor Mike Arrington’s recent moves: In May, after five years in the Valley, Arrington relocated to the Seattle area, where he has family. He jokes about being a Seattle misfit.

Industry watchers looking for a money angle instantly concluded that Arrington plans to sell TechCrunch. He moved, say the wags, because Washington has no personal income tax.

Beyond the potential for a payday, Seattle reporter John Cook blogged that “Arrington hinted that he was burned out and ready to sell the online publishing empire that he created five years ago this month.” Cook is a former newspaper reporter, so he’s trained not to make stuff up.

Business Insider reporter Nicholas Carlson cranked that up into a headline, and added a photo that makes Mike look world-weary.

I’ve asked Arrington for a quote on whether he’s seriously planning to sell. No response yet. (Contrary to what you might expect, there’s not much blogger-hate between our sites. Except when they scoop us.)

My guess is that the more Arrington looks into a sale, the more he’ll realize how much he likes being a Silicon Valley kingmaker. In theory, he could start another company and succeed. In practice, that doesn’t usually happen. It ends with the former founder puttering at a VC firm. Congrats!

The most successful tech legends are those who stuck with their early successes — Gates, Ellison, Sergey and Larry, Steve Jobs (if you don’t count his decade or so of exile), and now Mark Zuckerberg. Mike Arrington’s big success came later in life, but it would be stupid to let go just yet. Arrington doesn’t need an exit, he needs a vacation.

Companies: techcrunch

People: Michael Arrington

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

According to Reuters, Affirmed Networks Inc., a Waltham, Mass. stealth telecom startup, has secured $10.89 million of an $11.52 million funding round. Backers include Charles River Ventures, at whose office the company is being incubated, and Matrix Partners. The company was founded by Sonus Networks vets Harris Fishman and Hassan Ahmed. It does not yet have a public website.

Reuters also reports that Ace Metrix, a New York-based provider of real-time television advertising analytics, has raised an undisclosed amount of strategic funding from WPP. A recent regulatory filing indicates around $2.24 million in new equity, although it’s unclear how much, if any, of that came from WPP. Ace Metrix previously raised around $6 million from Leapfrog Ventures, Palomar Ventures and Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

The Ace Metrix syndicated software service, first launched in June 2009, features the Ace Score, a patent-pending measurement of television advertising creative effectiveness. The service provides standardized metrics that enable advertisers to benchmark ads within their own brands, and against the competition. WPP joins previous investors Leapfrog Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures.

HiSoft, an IT outsourcing company in the Chinese cities of Beijing and Dalian, has filed for an IPO of 7.4 million American depository shares being sold at between $11 and $13 per share. Reuters says HiSoft plans to trade on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol HSFT, with Deutsche Bank Securities serving as lead underwriter. Shareholders include Granite Global Ventures(22.6% pre-IPO stake),International Finance Corp. (11.9%), Jafco Asia Technology Fund (8.2%), Draper Fisher Jurvetson (8.2%), Tian Hai International(7.8%), Intel Capital (7.8%) and GE Capital (7.2%).

Motricity Inc., a Bellevue-based provider of mobile marketplace management solutions, raised $50 million in its IPO. Motricity’s customers include AT&T, which powers ATT.net with Motricity’s mPower service. Compared to the company’s pre-existing funding of $365 million, it’s not a blowout exit. The company sold just 5 million shares at $10 per share, after originally filing to sell 6.75 million shares at between $14 and $16 per share.

After failing to price on Wednesday night as expected, the company lowered its target to 5.87 million shares being offered at between $10 and $11 per share. Motricity has raised over $365 million in VC funding from Advanced Equities, Carl Icahn, New Enterprise Associates, Technology Crossover Ventures, Massey-Burch Capital, Noro-Moseley Partners, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Sienna Ventures, TriState Investment Group and Wakefield Group.

Companies: Ace Metrix, Affirmed Networks, HiSoft, Motricity

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

It’s OK if you don’t know what SIEM — security information and event manager — is. What matters is that SIEM vendors enable companies to centralize, store and make use of large volumes of data created by the computers on their networks. The volume of that data is not only growing, it’s accelerating.

AlienVault, which offers both open-source and proprietary SIEM software, was founded in 2007 and has offices in Madrid, Atlanta and San Francisco. The company has announced its first major funding round, a Series A of $4 million led Adara Venture Partners, with additional money coming from Teldat Group and Neotec.

AlienVault plans to use the money to expand its market. Adara managing partner Alberto Gómez said in a prepared statement accompanying the announcement, “It is not often that you find a growing company that has established such a dominant market share so early and with such opportunity still lying ahead.”

Companies: AlienVault

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital have invested in stealthy company called Work Market that allows business to manage their labor and services. Neither fund disclosed the size of the round.

The company’s site is delightfully spartan right now, except for listing job openings for MySQL and Java developers. Work Market was founded by Jeff Leventhal, who previously founded a company for on-site services, such as computer, repair called OnForce.

Union Square’s Principal Fred Wilson joins the board and writes:

Jeff has been working in this sector for the better part of twenty years and Work Market is his fourth startup. We love working with serial entrepreneurs with a deep passion for a particular domain. That’s Jeff and his passion is bringing transparency and efficiency to work markets.

Work Market is expanding their team and is looking for A+ development and product management talent (Java and PHP) in the Greater New York area; click here to see the company’s job openings.

Companies: Union Square Ventures, Work Market

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Once-mighty publishing house Ziff Davis, whose enthusiast magazines Car and Driver, Stereo Review, and PC Magazine filled American households for most of the 20th century, has been bought by a former editor of Fortune and Money magazines. Ziff filed for bankruptcy in 2008, was restructured, and sold off or shut down all of its print publications to become an online-only publisher.

Vivek Shaw, a fourteen-year veteran of magazine publisher Time Inc., partnered with private equity firm Great Hill Partners to purchase Ziff Davis for an unspecified amount of money. Shaw told the New York Times he was attracted to Ziff’s all-digital content, specialized topics, and large “in-market” audience, which means people looking to buy something.

Shaw sees Ziff’s content as a lead generator for consumer goods and services. “If you’re reading five printer reviews, I probably have a sense that you are in the market for a printer,” he told the Times.

Ziff Davis’ ups and downs since the rise of the Internet have served as a warning to other publishers. In the 1990s, Ziff Davis acted early and often to capitalize on the Internet and computers, launching the influential ZDnet websites and the ZDTV television network, now known as TechTV.

But instead of taking the publishing industry to an exciting new level, the Internet undermined its economics. “It used to be you could build a real career inside ZD, moving from one publication to another,” a former employee told me. “The whole thing disappeared.”

It’s too bad, because Ziff Davis magazines were hugely influential in their fields as more than just buyers’ guides. In the 1920s, Amazing Stories brought the work of Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Wells to young people. In the Seventies, Car and Driver brought edgy humorists P.J. O’Rourke and Bruce MacCall onboard and brazenly flouted America’s traffic laws with its  Cannonball Run race from New York to Los Angeles. More recently, PC Magazine published geek-baiting columns by John C. Dvorak, who mocked Apple’s iBook as too girly for a man to carry.

ZD’s latest reinvention suggests not that people read online now, but that they don’t read at all unless they’re shopping for a printer. The market for iconoclastic, entertaining, memorable narrative seems to have shifted from print to television. Think Lost, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica. Will tablet computers bring back reading among computerphiles? No, they’ll bring back TV watching. Sorry, writers.

Companies: Ziff Davis

People: Vivek Shaw

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Online video sharing site Metacafe has secured $5 million of an expected $6 million in debt, options, warrants and securities, according to a filing with the SEC. This was an internal round of financing, according to Michelle Cox, the company’s vice president of marketing communications and sales. The Palo Alto, Calif. company is backed by Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

Metacafe attracts roughly 14 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, according to Comscore and focuses on 18 to 34-year-olds. Cox said the company using the funds to build out its editorial and sales teams. The company, which filters videos based on viewer reactions, launched a new site dedicated to movies in late May. Competitors include YouTube and Dailymotion.

Companies: Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Dag Ventures, Dailymotion, Highland Capital Partners, YouTube

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Mobile recommendations startup Rummble raised $800,000 from m8 Capital to grow its arsenal of apps that record and match people’s tastes and preferences.

On the surface, Rummble resembles other location-based apps which offer users the chance to check in at venues, like Foursquare and Gowalla from the U.S. It even started aggregating their check-ins earlier this year.

But its cofounders say a powerful recommendation system underpins the service, matching your tastes with those of other people who happen to like the same types of venues. Founder and chief executive Andrew Scott says the service is like Google’s PageRank algorithm for the physical world. That said, the experience of the app isn’t nearly as slick as its American counterparts quite yet. Loading nearby places or what friends are up to can take a few seconds.

What’s also interesting about the funding is that its m8’s first investment. m8 is an affiliate of AGC Equity Partners and has partners and principals from Symbian and traditional investment banking and private equity backgrounds.

It will use the funding partly to establish a San Francisco office.

Tags: location, mobile apps

Companies: Rummble

People: andrew scott

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More