Brightcove, the television-on-web company that is also one of the Business 2.0 Next Net 25 start-ups, is going to open its service to all comers later this week. Jeremy Allaire, founder and chief executive of Brightcove, made this announcement in his keynote speech at the NAB show. For past six months, Bright Cove has been an invitation-only commercial preview. The service will be available for free. More details are likely to emerge on Wednesday.

Viacom is buying X-Fire for $102 million, according to company sources. Think of it as the consolation prize for Viacom, which was rumored to be in talks with Facebook!

XFire is a tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. The two-and-a-half year old company was co-founded by Mike Cassidy, Dennis “Thresh” Fong (World Champion of Doom, Quake, and Quake 2) and Adam Boyden.

The company was backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, NEA, and Granite Global Ventures. Business 2.0 had an interesting article on the company and its appeal as a marketing channel to twenty-something males.

Net activists have launched a Save the Internet campaign, hoping to build a grass roots groundswell in order to maintain the status quo over network neutrality.

You can read about the reasons in great detail here or simply watch a two minute video here to get a sense of why network neutrality effects everyone.

I admire the work being done by the activists, but I have some what will be unpopular observations. For instance, the campaign has a very US centric view of the Internet, especially at a time when the global Internet is becoming bigger and bigger. Shouldn’t the campaign be, Save The US Internet – after all most of the problems are very US centric.

Continue »

In the words of Yogi Berra, its like deja vu all over again.

Every weekend I wake up, make myself a nice cup of coffee, pour it in my lovely Apple coffee mug, and turn on the computer. Only to find the same stories, different publications. You Tube not getting premium advertisers because of the content issues is a recurring theme. We mentioned this problem about 300 cups of coffee ago.

Or the latest piece in NYT on MySpace, its advertising challenges and the future of community. It seems like one big mash-up of three of our old pieces here, here and here. The only interesting bit in the Times story is the planned expansion to Europe.

With the News Corporation’s help, he is opening an office in London to coordinate MySpace’s expansion in Europe. He is cutting deals to let members connect to MySpace over cellphones.

Is that a realization that the growth in the US is going to peter out? If yes, then they are smart to think about the day when the network meets its outer-limit. How successful will MySpace be in Europe? That is an interesting question to ponder about!

Business 2.0 has a short but sweet story on Netflix, and the evolution of its envelope from its early days to now. (Photos are here.)

In 1999, Netflix started out with a heavy cardboard mailer. With only 100,000 subscribers, costs weren’t a concern yet. Then the company experimented with plastic envelopes, which proved not to be recyclable, and padding, which added too much to postage costs. Both top-loading and side-loading envelopes made an appearance. Seven years of tweaking have paid of… How well those iconic red envelopes will help the company fend off the newest threat – video-on-demand – remains to be seen.

eBay is very very worried about Google and is trying to work with either Yahoo or MSN (or both) to try and blunt Google, reports The Wall Street Journal. It is a big article about the age old saying: enemy of my enemy is a friend. The really juicy bit is about the consulting giant McKinsey & Co’s conclusions about Google.

Few at eBay initially saw reason to fear Google, say people at the company, in part because of a 2003 study it commissioned from McKinsey & Co. McKinsey concluded that Google wouldn’t use its search capabilities to break into e-commerce. That made Google a manageable threat, say people familiar with the study. EBay’s dependence on Google increased as it shifted ad dollars to online ads from traditional media throughout 2004.

I think McKinsey reports should come with a statutory warning. Why? These are the same people who told AT&T back in the day, that mobile phones will be a niche market. And if that was not enough, I have two words for you: Jeffrey Skilling. (Of course, there is The Witch Doctors a fascinating book if there is about McKinsey blunders.)

So what are your thoughts on eBay & New Friends versus Google. It could be part of a big strategic report ;-)

Given how expensive optical equipment is these days, it is laughable to even suggest that we will have local area networks based on optical networking technologies. But in not so near distant future it is going to be a distinct reality.

Japanese giants Fujitsu and Mitsui have formed a new start-up, QD Laser, ,to explore opportunities in quantum dot lasers. The technology was developed by Fujitsu Ltd., Fujitsu Laboratories, and Professor Yasuhiko Arakawa’s laboratory at the University of Tokyo.

Quantum dots are a “single nanometer” semiconductor particles, and can be used as the basis of Quantum Dot Lasers, which are said to be far superior to conventional lasers. They have the ability to work over longer distances and can also support higher speeds. The Japanese companies contend that the QDLs will become light sources for optical networks, and will eventually find their way into optical access and local area networks. What really is strange about this deal is that the companies are investing about 290 million yen, which works out to about $2.5 million.