GigaOM

eBay and by proxy Skype wants to do just more than IM and voice chats. And that is why they’re pushing the service, and its clients, into new directions — from telepresence to video to whatever they can think of next. (My inner skeptic says they have to keep that user base growing in order to spin out or sell Skype.)

According to NewTeeVee, Skype today signed a new deal with San Francisco-based Jaman that “will let Skype users insert film clips into their conversations to share with friends. The new service will be available on Skype over the coming months.”

The way it’s supposed to work is this: Continue »

How to visualize the colossal amount of data surrounding climate change? Al Gore squeezed a lot of info into 100 minutes and a PowerPoint presentation, but the next step needs to be dynamic, interactive and malleable. With that in mind, two government research groups out of the UK have released climate change-related data using Google Earth Outreach. Earth2Tech has the full story on their efforts, as well as a how-to for viewing the data.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released its report on broadband usage and penetration with some interesting findings and observations. Instead of bemoaning the problems of broadband here in the United States, how about some highlights from the 151-page report, which I hope to dig into later today:

• At the end of 2007, U.S. broadband companies had 69.9 million subscribers, making it the largest OECD country by total number of subscribers, and represented 30 percent of the total OECD subscriber base.
• The United States ranks 15th with a broadband density of 23.3 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
• Denmark has the highest broadband density at 35.1 percent.

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Mobile browsing has clearly moved beyond 9-to-5 users and made inroads among the happy hour set. A recent survey by Opera showed about 40 percent (and about 60 percent in the United States, South Africa and Indonesia) of Opera Mini users visit social networking sites when surfing on a mobile. For those unfamiliar with the Opera Mini browser, it allows a user to see an entire web page and zoom in on desired content as long as they have Java on the phone.

The survey also shows which top 10 sites surfers visited in each country. The U.S. list begins with MySpace and ends with eBay. In between socializing and shopping is more socializing through Hi5 and Facebook, as well as search via Google, Microsoft Live and Yahoo. It looks like even if we aren’t using our phones for talking, we’re still using them to connect — and to settle bar bets. Wikipedia is the No. 8 slot in the United States. As the chart below shows, if users have an easy way to access the web on their mobiles they will. Carriers and device makers take note!

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Virtualization holds lots of promise: Move your physical machines to virtual ones, and you’ll reclaim capacity at the same time that you make operations easier. But applications seldom run on one machine; instead they’re a combination of servers, switches and routers. 3Tera’s recently announced product road map may let companies provision whole data centers atop cloud grids like Amazon’s EC2. Call it a Virtual Data Center.

“Most large-scale systems, in order to move up the ladder and serve more customers, require more and more resources,” said Bert Armijo, 3Tera’s VP of product and marketing. “If you manage them as individual virtual machines, the problem is that the human load — the ability to actually remember what’s running where and to manipulate it all — becomes overwhelming. At some point, somebody makes a very small mistake that results in a very large outage.”

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Just when I thought Roku, a device maker started by Anthony Woods, had kicked the bucket, NewTeeVee reports that they are coming back as a set-top box supplier for Netflix and its video download service. Woods had joined Netflix after leaving Roku in April 2007. The box basically downloads movies from Netflix via a broadband connection.

At present, 10,000 movies are available for download. Despite the $100 price tag, I think Netflix clearly has its work cut out for it, much like any other Internet set-top box maker. Despite the presence of many deep-pocketed device makers, there are none who can be labeled a success.

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Despite all the troubles with VoIP service providers such as SunRocket and Vonage, VoIP as a technology seems to be doing quite well in the U.S., according to data from Telegeography. As of the end of March, there were 16.3 million consumer VoIP lines, or about 13.8 percent of U.S. households, and 27 percent of households with broadband lines installed.

It’s hardly a surprise, as a lot new additions are coming from people buying triple-play services from cable companies. As of the end of the first quarter of 2008, here’s how the cable VoIP data broke down:

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