The winner of last year’s inaugural competition was web video company Ooyala, an entrant in the busy video platform space. This year’s grand prize winner, to be announced in November, will get $50,000 in cash, $50,000 worth of AWS services and mentoring from an AWS executive — and may even snare an investment offer from the company itself.

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Google has been frank about why it wants better public access to broadband, but Page made the case again. If it’s easier for people to search the web, he said, “we’d make a lot more money without changing anything about what we do as a business.”

During both an on-stage tete-a-tete with FCC chair Kevin Martin and a press conference afterwards, both men agreed there’s a general trend in industry, and even among regulators, to address ways to bring cheap and widely available broadband to as many people as possible. Verizon, for example, has to stick by FCC conditions about allowing gadgets other than its phones to operate on its network when it comes to its recently acquired 700 MHz-band win. But the company would probably extend those conditions to other bandwidths it owns, Martin said.

In terms of devices, Page argued that making $5 Wi-Fi radio chips that talk on all bands and protocols would help the push for openness. “We should do that. And we probably can,” he said. That also means regulators need to look more closely at where current spectrum policy is outdated, he added.

Image courtesy of Paul Kapustka.

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But it’s not all about Obama. Sales of Mickey Edwards’ “2008 Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost — And How It Can Find Its Way Back” have climbed to 131st place from way down at No. 23,190 just a day ago.

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Brilliant made his comments at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In his view, The Well, an online community he founded back the public Internet dark ages of the 1980s, remains unparalleled as a forum for the sharing of new ideas because it doesn’t promote a linear, chronological conversation the way a blog does, but lets people drop in and add to the discussion already underway.

In fact, there are no forums online where the big issues of the day — whether climate change or homelessness — are being hashed out, Brilliant said. That’s despite a broad hunger for communities where people can have coherent conversations about issues that impact our lives. Companies need to tap into this desire for public conversation about big ideas by connecting to people’s emotional intelligence, he said.

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While this data only pertains to Flirtomatic, it is proof that the right kind of service can tap into the viral marketing gold mine on mobile phones. While Flirtomatic has no plans to include advertising in messages, Mark Curtis, CEO of Handmade Mobile, the company behind Flirtomatic, said other mobile messaging companies could take advantage of the opportunity suggested by the company’s research.

Mary Meeker, who leads Morgan Stanley’s global technology research, just spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit, where she pointed out that ads are ultimately going to follow eyeballs. Meeker said the growth of Opera’s mobile web browser — which CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner told us is quite healthy — illustrates mobile growth overall. Taken together with Flirtomatic’s survey data, the future of mobile advertising looks very bright indeed.

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The company’s three tech news shows are five-minute roundups along the lines of Webb Alert and Rocketboom but in localized Spanish, English and French editions. In March, Mobuzz also launched separate Spanish gossip and news shows, bringing its total production run to 100 shows a month.

While advertising revenue is growing — €250,000 so far this year, up from €80,000 in 2006 — founder Anil De Mello said, it doesn’t cover salaries for the 16 staff or the company’s distribution, hosting and content delivery budgets. De Mello, who has largely bootstrapped Mobuzz with the help of angel funding and advertising revenue, said an investment round that appeared set to go ahead in September fell through because of the financial crisis. The economic downturn also prompted Mobuzz’s original investor to pull out.

At four years old, the videoblog is a grandaddy, and with several major industry awards under its belt it has definitely already found its feet. There are about 2 million downloads of Spanish content each month from the Mobuzz site, 1.5 million downloads of the English show and 300,000 of its French counterpart, according to De Mello. The YouTube editions of the shows get around 500,000 total views a month, he said.

The call for help is a clever pitch to a loyal audience, and a purely user-generated revenue stream isn’t a new idea. But during our conversation De Mello also said the company could, with new funding, be profitable by early 2009, and that it’s already talking to potential investors, including a major media company in Spain (he wouldn’t give specifics). That promise of new funding suggests user support will be more of a vital stopgap measure for an old hand, rather than a new revenue model for a stripling show.

That said, the outpouring of donations — around 14 percent of the target amount within a day — has had De Mello reconsidering a subscription-based revenue model. He said he’s been surprised by the outpouring of support — Europeans aren’t typically as culturally predisposed to charitable giving as Americans are, he noted.

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From the news reports of long lines

1. Google’s election results map mashup is part of its broader elections coverage
2. AOL has a nifty browser toolbar to track elections-related news, including add-on buttons for Senate and House race updates.
3. A pollster on the polls: Democratic pollster Mark Blumenthal will live-blog results at Pollster.com beginning around 5 p.m. EDT.
4. The left-leaning blog Talking Points Memo has an election results map that will begin streaming results live at 6 p.m. EDT.
5. Cascade Software makes an iPhone app, Election, that will update results as they come in.
6. Electoral-Vote.com will start liveblogging results and update its electoral college map.

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Image courtesy of Google

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Bell said reports the company would shrink its manufacturing operations were speculation. But he said Dell’s ongoing move into providing infrastructure as a service is part of a business direction that will cut back on the more labor-intensive service model of the past, in favor of, for example, the remote support services the company now offers.

While the consumer market still accounts for just 15 percent of the company’s revenue, Bell said its existing laptop personalization features are going to expand to allow “true individualization” of the outside of laptops, but he wouldn’t give specifics. He hinted at other areas the company was looking at in PC personalization but didn’t give details, and he also declined to comment on the likelihood of a Dell phone.

But Bell did say the company doesn’t buy into the idea that consumers want complete convergence of Internet devices. Handheld and laptop devices won’t end up as one device everyone uses, he said, and the company is testing out whether netbooks in developed markets will end up complementing rather than replacing fullsize PCs. For now, that means the company is focused on larger screens and keybords rather than smaller devices.

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The new site, launching some time in February, will pull personal information from sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, as well as other public records online, but will retain Reunion’s social networking and friend-finding features. Neither company gave details about how much searches will cost users; right now  Reunion uses a freemium model.

Web users don’t always grasp the privacy settings on the sites they populate, and the argument that the data scattered across the web is publicly available anyway won’t entirely remove the creepy factor of finding so much personal information in one place. But branding the site as a social networking nexus could ease some of the concerns and draw in users — as long as the results are at least as accurate as those provided free by Google.

In terms of raw user numbers, Reunion already has an edge on other players in the social search space. The company says it has about 12 million unique monthly visitors. Compete.com put that number at 9.5 million in September, versus some 889,000 on Spock.com, 283,000 on Wink.com, 261,000 on PeekYou.com and 25,000 on newcomer 123People.com. Reunion is adding 1.6 million new members each month, according to CEO Jeff Tinsley. He notes that the site is most popular with users over the age of 25.

Reunion, which is profitable, raised a $25 million Series A round from Oak Investment Partners in April 2007. Wink raised $6 million from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund and Cambrian Ventures, according to CEO Michael Tanne. The new company says it will double its staff in Mountain View (to about 24) and boost its Santa Monica staff, currently about 120, by 25 to 30 percent.

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1. Track voter rights news and resources at the nonpartisan Election Protection coalition’s 866ourvote.org.
2. Check out a map-based overview of voting machines used in each state from VerifiedVoting.org and the Verified Voter Foundation, both run by technologists advocating for reliable and publicly verifiable elections.
3. Read up on candidates on the non-partisan Govtrack.us and On the Issues.org
4. Call the soapbox at Social42.com and leave your rant or rave about either major candidate; your message will be posted on the site and others can listen — and rate and comment on it.
5. Upload photo messages about the election, the candidates and the issues to Giveusahope.com.
6. Follow and contribute crowd-sourced election stories and add your two cents on media bias at Skewz.com.
7. Take a look at the aggregation of election-related news stories, blogs, polls, video and commentary on Electicker2008.com.
8. Check out interactive electoral college maps at 270towin.com.
9. Contribute election-related news stories and video and blog posts to Politics.com.

Image courtesy of VerifiedVoting.org.

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The 19-employee company provides scalable cloud storage that started out as web hosting provider has diversified into providing cloud services, becoming a default infrastructure provider to many social applications, notably the Facebook platform. Joyent got a start with a seed round four years ago and is cash-flow positive, according to Joyent VP Rod Boothby.

A very informal survey of developers at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference earlier this week suggested there’s still broad anxiety around the security and reliability of cloud services, including storage. But companies feeling the pinch of the credit crisis may have to forgo new, large data centers — or even just a handful of servers — and instead look to cloud-based services storage is and find them to look a lot more appealing. Cloud storage infrastructure contracts don’t present the immediate or longer-term capital or staffing commitments that new server farms demand.

Economies of scale presented by cloud vendors could trump immediate concerns about reliability, but such concerns are likely to persist, and vendors will be differentiated by how they handle data security integrity.

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With the company’s little green plugin tool, users can send web content to friends in their social networks or address books; they can also post links directly into their social networking site profiles. Publishers who install the button can gather user metrics, among them unique views, click-through ratios and readers’ content popularity rankings.

In January, the company said more than 26 million unique users had installed the ShareThis button over a two-month period. When Nextumi, the company behind ShareThis, raised a $15 million Series B round in March, Om noted that ShareThis said it was growing at 50 percent each month. In terms of the most recent unique user count, it’s fallen behind that growth rate.

But with even online advertising revenue expected to head south in the current belt-tightening environment, it’s a good time to be a startup that monetizes content measurement rather than one of the many young companies relying on ad distribution as a business model. Publishers are going to be looking for every possible way to get more users to visit their sites, but might not be so quick to spend on ads.

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The upgraded iPlayer will allow users to synchronize content across devices via Microsoft’s Live Mesh environment — functionality its Adobe AIR download management can’t support — and will add social networking features such as reviews and recommendations that essentially crowdsource some of the marketing for the already popular player. The social networking features will be limited to simple content-sharing options at first, as the national broadcaster has to tread a careful line between engaging a tech-savvy audience with one less familiar with digital media, Rose said. “The goal is not to build another Facebook.”

But unless you’re prepared to engage in proxy shenanigans and pretend you’re in the UK, the shiny new version of the player will remain closed to residents outside of the region. The BBC’s unique funding structure — it’s funded by national TV license fees and eschews ads — prevents the broadcaster from opening the iPlayer to outsiders. That revenue model also makes licensing the player outside the UK tricky, Rose said.

Users outside the UK who want to watch and share video with friends will have to stick with Joost for now.

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What’s new for the company right now?
JvT: The market is moving in our direction very, very clearly. As a company we’ve always had this idea that you access the same Internet from PCs and other devices. We’re having nice growth on the PC side and significant growth on the mobile side on devices — basically everything is growing…We’re the only company across the world that’s on everything.

But in terms of desktop market share don’t you still have a little under 1 percent?
JvT: No — the problem is the stats out there are very inaccurate and skewed toward markets where we’re not so strong. We have markets where we’re less than 1 percent market share and then we have markets where we have 55 percent market share — countries like Russia and neighboring countries. In Eastern and Northern Europe, the market share is double digits, as it is in some Asian countries, like Indonesia. In mobile we’re the leading vendor worldwide.

How is Opera Mini helping that market growth?
JvT: It’s the most popular mobile product right now with end users. Opera Mini runs on the server and via a small client on the phone, but from the end-user perspective, it works like a local browser. It compresses the data significantly, 85 percent on average, which gives mobile device speeds matching those of Wi-Fi. People are flocking to Mini in huge volumes — last month we had 19 million active users, not including OEM versions of the software, which we don’t track.

How is growth in emerging markets helping the Mini?
JvT: Only 20 percent of world has Internet access but half the world has mobile access. More and more of those operators and OEMs are installing Mini for users for whom it’s not about another way to get on the Internet, it’s the way.

What’s the breakdown of the rest of your user base?
JvT: For desktop, the last official number was between 25 million and 30 million users. I’m not able to give any numbers for Wii [Internet Channel]! There’s a long list of different devices we’re shipping on, in the millions, like Sony and Philips TVs.

How has the emergence of WebKit and Chrome changed the market for you?
JvT: The effect of Chrome so far has been 20 percent more downloads every day. It’s fairly logical when you think about it, because the biggest hurdle we have is all those people that don’t realize there’s an alternative in the market. Now, with the launch of Chrome there’s focus on the choice of browsers in the market.

Theoretically [WebKit] can be used to develop other browsers, but that’s not a trivial thing to do. There’s a fair amount of Mozilla-code-based browsers, but there’s only one that has success, and that’s the one controlled by Mozilla.

How is the global downturn impacting your business?
JvT: People are not going to stop using the Internet. We’re at the very early stages of Internet access in mobile, and that’s going to explode in the next few years, independent of any economic downturn. With our software, you don’t need to get the latest, shiniest model of phone, you don’t need to the 3G or 4G network to browse.

What are some of the new devices you see down the road?
JvT: Any device that could potentially be connected to the Internet would benefit from a browser, including special devices like barcode readers [for inventory management] on a closed network, or set-top boxes.

What’s next for Opera?
JvT and TT: The browser has been evolving into an engine for running applications, which benefits designers, because mobile side platform fragmentation is going to have a big impact on mobile devices. We also have a beta version of Dragonfly developer tools available for Opera 9.5 and above that lets developers debug remotely, via the web.

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A similar slide to broader censorship could emerge in Australia, too, if proposals to expand government controls over content pass into law. Despite opposition to the firewall proposal, some members of the Australian Parliament also want to broaden ISP filtering to include not just child pornography but also “hardcore pornography and fetish material” and gambling sites, according to The Age. ISPs in the U.S. have also agreed to block offensive material, namely child porn sites.

Government controls over the Internet are far from harmless, whether it comes to commerce or intellectual freedoms, but they’re also likely to be ultimately futile as China’s efforts at curtailing access to certain sites suggest.

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There was broad but cautious enthusiasm about the company having stepped up its push into collaborative services and software — after all “the cloud” isn’t going away, most people said, and Microsoft is making the right move by using its global heft and broad product and services reach to try and seamlessly link PCs, phones and web services for consumers and enterprise customers and developers.

I spoke with several attendees who work with companies and government agencies that handle very sensitive data, and all of them said their clients would balk at cloud storage until they get a closer look at the security and reliability of the architecture. In the U.S. there are, at the very least, regulatory hurdles around storing sensitive data remotely, said one developer who works with insurance companies. A Norwegian developer said he would run into similar roadblocks with his banking and government health services customers. That said, cloud services could also be a real boon for backend testing and development, another developer said.

More than a few attendees said there were no real big bangs at the conference, but given that the PDC is about broad ideas rather than rolling out finished products, that’s also probably no surprise. Biggest kudos — after the curiosity around Windows Azure — went to developments in the Windows Live platform’s Mesh services and the increasing openness of Microsoft’s platforms more generally.

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