Clunky, arbitrary and impersonal, the performance review as traditionally structured seems a particularly poor fit for web work that is based on agility, constant connection and the ability to tailor work to the individual. Feedback and performance evaluations are essential in business, but when it comes to web workers, is there a better way to accomplish this than the traditional review?

Technology may provide the answer, according to a recent Wired article covering companies that offer new sorts of solutions for providing feedback, including a startup called Rypple:

Rypple, whose investors include PayPal founder Peter Thiel, is part of a new crop of startups that put intensive feedback loops to work using simple technologies — in this case, the web — to gather data and play it back to users, with the goal of improving behavior — in this case, employee productivity and satisfaction.

With Rypple, feedback comes through four feeds: input from coworkers, either anonymous or identified; “thanks” messages from coworkers; tracking progress towards work goals; and coaching from supervisors. The Loops product, which the company will sell for $9 per employee per month, gathers these four feeds into one channel for a rich, robust, continuous performance review. The company also offers a freemium product that offers some basic feedback tools.

Rypple is currently being used at Facebook, and the article concludes that the constant stream of information it provides can make “feedback less intimidating, more appreciated — and more effective.”

Nick Stein, the director of content and media at Rypple, explained to WebWorkerDaily that the feedback stream provided by his company’s products may be particularly useful to teams working remotely. “It gives a manager visibility into what her team is working on all the time, and provides a shared online space that facilitates ongoing feedback and communication between colleagues — regardless of their physical location,” he said.

Do you think performance reviews need to be updated for the reality of web work, and are the type of products offered by Rypple the answer? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user HeatherHeatherHeather

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For those keeping track at home, that kind of revenue growth is pretty fantastic, but not terribly surprising. After all, YouTube serves more than 2 billion videos a day, including more than 100 million a day on mobile devices. And the site has very aggressively ramped up advertising over the past year, placing more ads against partner videos and those that run on mobile devices.

Pichette didn’t state revenue numbers, but doubling growth is not totally out of line with previous analyst projections. Barclay’s Capital analyst Doug Anmuth estimated that YouTube pulled in $450 million in revenues during 2009. While Anmuth’s forecast last January called for 55 percent growth, others were less conservative. Last March, Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that YouTube would generate nearly $1 billion in sales for the full year.

While doubling revenue is a plus, it’s important to note that Pichette said nothing about YouTube’s profitability. The question of when the online video site would finally turn a profit has been much debated over the past several years. Despite forecasts early last year that YouTube could become profitable in 2010, it seems that the unit — which Google paid $1.65 billion for back in 2006 — still isn’t in the black.

Coincidentally, the Google call was hosted on YouTube and suffered from some pretty dramatic stuttering and lag, which is surprising in part because it was audio-only.

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I’ve been an avid Netflix user for years, so I’ve accumulated quite a list of instant titles in my instant queue: about 450 at last count. So imagine my surprise when 160 of those titles were no longer available for streaming — and this happened after I had already chosen to discontinue the DVD-by-mail portion of my subscription. But it’s not just the number of movies that had dropped out of the streaming service, but the quality of the movies that were no longer available: award-winnings films like The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, indie favorites like The Royal Tenenbaums and Fargo, even cult classics like A Nightmare on Elm Street have all disappeared from the streaming service.

At the same time that some top content has passed out of my instant queue, the quality of new content being added seems (to me) to have markedly depreciated. While Netflix’s “Top Picks for Ryan” and overall recommendations system is still pretty good at pinpointing new content I’ll find interesting, I’ve noticed that I’m finding less and less of interest in the “New Movies to Watch Instantly” that have been added to the company’s streaming library. Sure, I might check out I’m Still Here just to see what all the buzz is about, and maybe — maybe — I’ll watch 70s classics like Woody Allen’s All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex or Dustin Hoffman’s turn as Lenny. But by and large, the new additions to Netflix’s streaming library pale in comparison to the content that just fell out of my Instant Queue.

Surely, Netflix is going through some growing pains right now. For all its success in growing its subscriber base and building a distribution platform for streaming content to practically every connected device known to man, Hollywood studios are growing increasingly wary of its market power. Some executives — like Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes — are openly hostile towards the company, while others are merely ambivalent about Netflix. While it is writing bigger and bigger checks to secure streaming rights to their content, it’s also eating away at DVD sales and could be prompting some consumers to cancel their cable subscriptions.

The overwhelming attitude towards Netflix seems to be that studios are willing to license their content — but for a price. And as this price goes ever higher, Netflix is having to pick and choose which streaming rights it wants to maintain and which it chooses to let lapse. All this could be what’s behind the big drop-off in availability of streaming titles that have interested me.

We’ve largely praised Netflix for being able to secure some high-profile content over the last year or so, including striking a deal with Epix to bring its streaming library to Netflix subscribers, and doing exclusive deals with indie film studios like Relativity Media and FilmDistrict to get exclusive access to their movies in the pay TV window. But all those exclusive, first-run deals come at a price; Netflix is reportedly paying upwards of $200 million a year for Epix content and another $150-$200 million for a deal it struck with Disney for access to ABC and Disney TV content.

The problem comes when access to new releases — especially new releases that aren’t particularly good — comes at the expense of library content that members still find valuable. For me, one of the key benefits of the service is being able to fire up a browser or my Xbox and choose from a wide variety of content that I find appealing. There’s still plenty of titles to choose from (including the other 280 films and TV shows in my Instant Queue), but the proportion of quality content disappearing versus that which is being added is troubling.

If Netflix hopes to keep its existing user base — and not just tack on new users — it should be aware of these issues. The company has long been criticized for not having enough quality content in its streaming library. While I was never one to complain about that, now more than ever I’m finding that sentiment to be true.

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Ezarik’s initial rise to viral fame in 2007 came when she filmed her iPhone bill; the self-professed Apple addict’s subsequent video work with gadgets was what got the attention of GTTV producer Joel Goodling. Ezarik has already filmed several segments for the show while at CES earlier this month, taking two days there to work for GTTV and then two days to produce material for her independent web presence.

Working there with the GTTV producers taught her a lot. “There were little random things I would do that the producers would notice, like, ‘Justine, you say awesome way too much!’” she said via phone.

Ezarik is committed to GTTV through the end of the year, but it’s not a full-time gig for her, as she believes that the team “will able to shoot a lot of it over the course of a few days,” leaving her time to continue working on YouTube.

As of right now there are no plans for Ezarik’s GTTV work to cross over to her YouTube channel, but Ezarik doesn’t think the two sides will stay completely separate, due to the overlap in her interests and the show’s. And she’ll be discussing her work on GTTV across all elements of her social media presence, including her Facebook page (over 430,000 followers) and Twitter (1.2 million followers). That may not even be written into her contract with GTTV (something she has done in the past with other deals); she’s just excited about the project.

The biggest change for Ezarik, ultimately, is that while her audience on YouTube is largely young women, GTTV is much more guy-oriented. However, while Ezarik acknowledged that the two demographics were very different, she didn’t see it affecting her performance style. “I’m still being myself and doing what I normally do,” she said.

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Bloom Energy, which has raised at least $400 million from investors, is saying that over a 10-year period, it can offer its customers electricity contracts for its Bloom Boxes for a cost less than standard grid power. Bloom says “customers can immediately save up to 20 percent on their energy bills,” and that Walmart, Staples, Coca-Cola, Caltech, Kaiser Permanente and BD have signed up for the program.

Update: According to VentureWire, Bloom has “quietly raised about $100 million more in equity in the past few months . . . according to two people familiar with the matter.”

While Bloom didn’t specify that customers will only save that kind of money in California, or only in states with aggressive subsidies, it seems like the math would work out that way. Lux Research has estimated that the cost of electricity over a Bloom server’s 10-year life is “$0.08/kWh to $0.10/kWh (when running as base-load for 24 hours a day), including government incentives and assuming a $7/mmBTU natural gas long-term contract.” Without subsidies, Lux predicted “electricity would cost $0.13/kWh to $0.14/kWh, with about $0.09/kWh from system cost and about $0.05/kWh coming from fuel cost. Note that this is high compared to average retail U.S. electricity costs of roughly $0.11/kWh.”

Perhaps removing the upfront fee will bring in more customers, though Bloom Energy founder KR Sridhar has maintained that the payback on investment for Bloom Box customers is 3 – 5 years in energy cost savings. Sridhar confirmed to me that the 3 – 5 year claimed payback is with the California and federal subsidy.

If you’re not familiar with the Bloom Box product, it’s a fuel cell that looks like an industrial-sized refrigerator. Fuel cells are kind of like chemical batteries, which combine solutions to create a chemical reaction that delivers electricity. Fuel cells have been under development by hundreds of manufacturers in the consumer electronics and auto industries for decades, but have remained too expensive and have been unable to break into the mainstream.

The nine-year-old Bloom launched last year to much fanfare, at an event with a list of customers like Google, and eBay, and with speeches by its celebrity backers: Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr and Colin Powell.

The Bloom Box sucks up oxygen on one side and fuel (natural gas, biomass, etc) on the other. Bloom bakes sand and cuts it into little squares that are turned into a ceramic, which are then coated with green and black “inks.” Using a special process, Bloom creates these ceramic discs and stacks them together interspersed with metal plates of “a cheap metal alloy.” The bigger the stack, the more power the Bloom Box will create.

Bloom is having a live press conference to talk more about the announcement at 10:00 a.m. PST at Caltech. Watch it if you want to follow the news.

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Lovefilm operates a business very similar to Netflix in Europe, offering subscriptions to a DVD-by-mail service and a streaming video service for a low monthly fee. The company has about 70,000 DVD and Blu-ray titles available by mail and about 7,500 films for streaming, compared to about 100,000 discs and 20,000 streaming titles available on Netflix. Like Netflix, Lovefilm is also expanding the availability of its streaming offering to be viewable on TVs, Blu-ray players, and other connected devices like the PlayStation 3. And last month, Lovefilm rolled out its streaming service to Germany, a new market for its over-the-top offering.

The acquisition shouldn’t come as a complete surprise; after all, Amazon already had a significant stake in Lovefilm prior to today’s announcement, and had reportedly been interested in buying out the remainder for quite some time. Amazon got that stake after Lovefilm acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008. Amazon also bought out one of Lovefilm’s venture backers to give it a 42-percent stake in the subscription video firm.

Amazon had long been rumored to have an interest in acquiring Netflix, as a way to supplement its online video-on-demand service with a subscription rental offering. But despite years of rumors, Amazon missed an opportunity to buy Netflix on the cheap, since Netflix stock has shot up over the last year, rising more than 250 percent in that time and giving it a market cap of almost $10 billion.

Speaking of Netflix, Amazon’s acquisition of Lovefilm comes not long after Netflix introduced its streaming service in Canada: its first international market. And after what it sees as a successful rollout there, Netflix has been making noise lately about accelerating its international push and entering new markets this year. That could mean that Netflix might soon launch in the UK, facing off against Lovefilm head-to-head.

At the same time, there’s the possibility that Amazon could bring Lovefilm’s offerings stateside. While the firm’s content seems to focus on the European market, Amazon has been looking to compete with Netflix directly, and reportedly had been pitching studios to operate its own subscription streaming business in the U.S. Using Lovefilm’s existing studio relationships and Amazon’s own cloud-based infrastructure, Amazon could possibly accelerate its subscription video plans and introduce a Netflix-like service here.

All that said, the two also have a somewhat symbiotic relationship, as Netflix is a huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer. Since announcing that it was moving to the cloud last year, Netflix has increasingly relied on AWS to power the backend infrastructure behind its streaming business, and may be one reason why Amazon recently increased file object size for its Simple Storage Service.

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We asked Hulu about the survey, and a spokesperson told us it’s part of its ad tailoring personalization feature. She added that it isn’t part of a bigger survey, and that Hulu won’t be releasing the results.

So it’s all just about delivering better ads. Or is it? One could imagine that Hulu could try to pacify its corporate overlords as well as various other rights holders with this survey. The site is owned in part by News Corp., NBC Universal (soon controlled by Comcast) and Disney, all of which are quite concerned about cord cutting.

In addition, rights holders have voiced concerns in the past that catchup services like Hulu could negatively affect the ratings of their prime time assets. Hulu’s life would surely a lot easier if it could tell all of these companies that the vast majority of its users still pay for and watch linear TV at home.

Are you using Hulu to cut the cord? Maybe you’ve even seen the same survey? Let us know in the comments. Want to know if Hulu Plus is a good replacement for cable? The check out the following episode of our weekly web series Cord Cutters:

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The addition of a standards-based platform for building web apps will be a welcome change for publishers in an increasingly fragmented TV app market. According to GigaOM Pro analyst Michael Wolf, there are at least 10 different TV app platforms to build for today, all of which are vying for developer attention.

But the diversity of TV app platforms, while giving publishers choice, also means those video creators who wish to have their content everywhere end up spending significant resources on building and re-building their user experience for multiple devices. The best example of this is probably Netflix, which is now available on more than 250 different connected devices.

However, even Netflix CEO Reed Hastings admits the company is paying an innovator’s tax by trying to be in all places at once; because it’s intent on leading the space, the company is investing significantly in making sure all of its TV apps work, sometimes on platforms that aren’t fully ready. Other publishers who come later should have significantly fewer headaches in building out their own apps, as the platforms reach maturity.

Moving to a standards-based approach for building TV apps will also make life easier for publishers. Already, some publishers — like music streaming service MOG — have said they will only build for platforms that support HTML5. The BBC Trust recently ruled that it will only build standard versions of its iPlayer video catchup service. Even Netflix is pushing for a more standards-based approach to delivering video to different devices.

Some consumer electronics companies are stepping up to the plate by offering standards-based browser capabilities. Google TV and Boxee both have HTML5-compatible browsers for displaying web content, although so far most publishers are more interested in taking an app-based approach.

Putting Opera’s browser on connected TVs might be one way to help publishers build HTML5-based experiences. Opera has a content development kit available for publishers that want to build standards-based web apps displayed through its browser, although it’s not clear if this functionality will be available on the new Sony TVs.

Even so, a browser-based approach, rather than one built on apps, might be one way publishers can reach multiple devices. In the same way publishers build HTML5-optimized pages for the iPad, they could also reuse those assets for connected devices that sport Opera and other standards-based browsers. That would allow them to build once and have their content formatted appropriately across multiple devices, without having to worry about rebuilding those experience for other app platforms.

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Hefner revealed the news about the iPad on his Twitter account, where he tweeted the following:

Big news! Playboy–both old & new–will be available on iPad beginning in March.—
Hugh Hefner (@hughhefner) January 19, 2011

In later tweets, he assured multiple followers that the magazine would be uncensored, and that back issues as well as current editions spanning the magazine’s entire run would be available for download. Hefner didn’t announce pricing or whether subscription plans were in the works. Many expect that Apple will introduce a digital subscription mechanic for iOS publications to coincide with the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s dedicated iPad newspaper The Daily, however. The Daily was supposed to launch this Wednesday, but has been reportedly been delayed a few weeks.

If Playboy does indeed arrive on the iPad with full nudity intact, it’ll mark a significant change in App Store policy. Apple has seemed intent on keeping even relatively innocuous depictions of nudity or brazen sexuality out of its app marketplace. Last June, it censored illustrated nude images in comics based on James Joyce’s Ulysses and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest. Sure, you could probably debate whether or not the nudity in those cases has a solid artistic motivation, but it’d be very difficult to have the same kind of discussion about Playboy.

The App Store isn’t completely without nudity, however. UK-based tabloid, The Sun, managed to somehow get its “Page 3 Girl,” who is depicted topless, through Apple’s vetting process in its iPad application. And this wasn’t just an oversight that Apple eventually corrected. In November 2010, The Sun introduced Page 360, a feature that lets you rotate the Page 3 girl, providing a 360-degree view of the model.

Perhaps Apple is moving forward with the Playboy venture after realizing that having nudity in the App Store through The Sun hasn’t been met with global public outrage or a boycott of the platform. The fact is, Apple has built a very robust parental control system during the past few major upgrades, and, as many have been quick to point out, the iPhone’s browser easily provides all the adult content anyone could ever dream of having access to.

Playboy is a good place to start if Apple is indeed planning to test the waters further with sexually suggestive material. Its depictions of nudity are fairly innocuous in terms of the spectrum of adult material, and it also offers some solid editorial content. If the public reacts poorly, it can easily pull the plug, but I think the platform is ready for this step, especially if Apple is serious about becoming a major magazine purveyor on the international market, where nudity in print is not at all uncommon.

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Hosted by Brian Kimmet and Ginger Gonzaga, The Morning After takes a TV-obsessed look at pop culture, with the first two episodes covering the Golden Globes, Piers Morgan’s new CNN series and the latest developments on The Bachelor. New episodes are available every weekday on both Hulu and Hulu Plus, though are currently geoblocked to the United States.

According to the blog post announcing the project, written by Hulu SVP Andy Forssell:

When we read the discussions boards on Hulu.com and tweets from our users, it’s clear to us that enjoying Hulu is about more than any one show. It’s also about how your favorite shows relate to the rest of what is going on in pop culture… Lately, our users have been asking us for a quick and fun way to stay current on the latest in pop culture. We looked far and wide for a show that struck the right balance between being entertaining and being informative, but we just couldn’t find something that hit the mark.

Which, therefore, is why Hulu had to go create its own show. Sort of.

The Morning After, technically, is not the first original content that Hulu has partnered with — technically, that would be last year’s reality series If I Can Dream, which recently completed its first season. Hulu is also the distributor of original series like The LXD and the upcoming Kiefer Sutherland-starring series The Confession.

However, while all of these shows are produced by outside production companies, Morning After is the first show where Hulu originated the initial idea, then reached out to find a production company to create the show. Jace Hall’s HD Films collaborated on the concept for the show and also handles all production; the company already has a background in multi-platform production thanks to other original series like The Jace Hall Show.

So far, Morning After is a little stiffer than Jace Hall was, heavy on the clips but light on personality. Despite the tightness of the format, though, both Kimmet and Gonzaga seem to have the potential to loosen up a bit behind that desk — provided, of course, that they get the chance.

However, that may very well come: Forssell is very upfront about the fact that the show is a work in progress. From the blog: “We consider this our ‘preview’ period for The Morning After. It’s a chance for us to develop and evolve the show with your input.” Because, ultimately, the show is meant to be a service for Hulu users, and thus it’s audience response that will drive the direction of the show — and determine its success.

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