Tallhamn said in the blog post that the company failed to draw a lead investor “willing to commit enough capital to fill out the round with follow on investors.” His insights are an indicator of the struggles for the entire energy management sector, including potential competitors that Tallhamn used in a slide from the Cleantech Open including Ecofactor, EnergyHub, AlertMe, and Control4.

The investment community’s perspective on this space had become significantly more critical since we got started, and probably for good reasons. A lot of capital has been destroyed in Series A-Z rounds of funding by our competitors, and most investors made it clear that they’d want to see massive traction before committing capital. They were taking a “wait and see” approach.

The business of helping consumers reduce and manage energy consumption in homes and across appliances and devices is such a small market right now, there can’t be too many players going after basically non-existent revenue. OPower, which provides data analytics and software for utilities for energy bills, is one of the few companies in energy management that I know of that is doing well.

Many of the revenues right now depend on scoring utility deals, which can take months and years to implement. Though, there has also been recent attention from the telcos and consumer electronics companies in the energy management space. But as we’ve mentioned pure play energy management gadgets probably won’t be that interesting to consumers — the gadgets will have to do something else, too, like manage your media or run a home security system. Tallhamn said in his blog post: “On a micro level, the average household’s energy costs are so small ($4k on average across electricity and fuel) that any direct to consumer product aiming to reduce them needs to deliver something beyond just savings.”

Hug was taking a free approach, and looking to mine energy information, with Scoble calling Hug the “Mint of your energy bill.” The company had launched a downloadable energy management application for computers that compiled how many minutes your computer slept and basically called your attention to how much energy you were saving. That app was only a “trojan horse” into a plan to grab a greater piece of the energy management sector, and the company’s idea was to start building a user base before the smart energy devices hit the market, “so that we’d be in a great position for becoming the leading supplier of analytics and control software once they had arrived,” writes Tallhamn.

But alas, you can’t build a product without funding. Tallhamn writes:

Knowing when to push through and when to call it quits is probably one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, and while I’ll never know for sure, I feel quite confident that this was the right decision for everyone involved.

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CumuLogic was co-founded by Sun Cloud and Startup Essentials vets Rajesh Ramchandani and Laura Ventura, and touts Java creator James Gosling and former Sun CIO Bill Vass as the leaders of its technical advisory board. According to Ramchandani, he and Ventura were inspired to create a Java PaaS after they left Oracle and started thinking about how Sun could might have expanded its cloud computing efforts into the PaaS space had Oracle not killed Sun’s cloud project upon its acquisition of the company. We’ll never know how close CumuLogic is to what Sun might have done, but the company does appear to have embraced Sun’s legacy of giving users plenty of choice and control.

CEO Sandip Gupta told me that CumuLogic is focused on legacy Java applications, of which companies have written countless numbers over the years. Instead of rewriting applications to fit new platforms and, essentially, giving up application components on which companies might have standardized over the years, CumuLogic wants to give them the flexibility to keep using those components, from application platforms to databases. Further, CumuLogic wants to give customers choice of where to host their PaaS environment by providing a software product that can be installed locally or atop an IaaS cloud. Makara, the cloud software recently acquired by Red Hat, offers the same functionality with regard to deployment, but the companies differ in terms of scope.

CumuLogic also is trying to set itself apart by retaining a degree of IT control over the environment. Gupta explained that CumuLogic gives IT administrators the ability to do things like determine application lifecycles, establish permissions and transition environments from dev-test to production — all while giving end users the self-service, automated experience they expect from a PaaS offering.

As anyone following cloud computing over the past several weeks has noticed, however, options for Java PaaS are proliferating fast.  Among the offerings now supporting Java applications are Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine, VMforce, CloudBees, Makara and Windows Azure. But each product differs in terms of where they’re hosted, what frameworks and stacks they support, and whether they also support additional programming languages. Gupta thinks CumuLogic can carve out a niche serving the likely sizable population of companies, service providers and ISVs that want to support legacy Java applications in the cloud, which probably is true for the time being until customers start writing new applications in today’s popular web languages such as Ruby and PHP. If that time comes, he added, CumuLogic is willing to look at expanding its scope.

Java image courtesy of Flickr user Dominic’s pics.

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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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Liquavista displays reduce power consumption much like the Pixel Qi screens currently found in the Notion Ink Adam tablet and Qualcomm’s promising Mirasol display technology. Instead of the standard option of using a backlight to brighten the display, a Liquavista screen has three options: reflective, transmissive and transflective. Indoors, the screen can act just like a traditional LCD display while outdoors, natural light can be reflected through the pixels for clarity and brightness, without a backlight consuming any power. Transmissive is the typical backlit technology LCDs have used for years, while using natural, passive light for reflective displays is a more recent development. Transflective both reflects and transmits light as needed to save power while still displaying a high-quality image.

So Liquavista has both a power-efficient solution and is outdoor-friendly. But how can an e-Ink type of display be used on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets? The company says its electrowetting technology can refresh a screen up to 60 times per second, opening the door to the high frame rates needed for gaming, video consumption and other media activities on a handheld device. An early prototype Liquavista display was filmed by the BBC last year, and about halfway through the video, you can see a few examples of full-screen, color video playback.

Such frame-rates open the door for Samsung to incorporate Liquavista’s electrowetting technology into handsets, which could help boost battery life. Samsung currently uses its Super AMOLED technology in its Galaxy S line of smartphones, the Nexus S, and its two Windows Phone 7 devices. Super AMOLED is also a power-efficient technology, but can’t leverage the outdoor properties of Liquavista’s screens, so future Samsung handsets could look just as good outside as they do indoors, if not better.

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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 are working hard with our U.S. carrier partners to bring meaningful smartphone solutions to market that are compelling consumer experiences, have strong operator support and a thriving ecosystem. As in any business, plans can change and deliberate decisions must be made to enable clear focus on bringing the right products to market at the right time.”

From the sounds of the statement, and given that Nokia hasn’t gained traction here in the U.S. with its Symbian devices, it appears to me that Nokia and AT&T couldn’t agree on the financial details of a carrier deal. Conversations may have ended a February launch, but Nokia appears open to revisiting a deal with AT&T — or perhaps the other big GSM operator, T-Mobile — to get its current high-end smartphones in front of consumers at a price competitive to iPhones and Android handsets.

The situation, if true, also tells me that AT&T is confident enough with its current and planned phone portfolio. Yes, the carrier is losing iPhone exclusivity in a few short weeks, but AT&T has solid Android offerings including the new Motorola Atrix 4G, which can fit in a laptop-like dock or pump 1080p video to a high-definition television set.

I actually had high hopes that Nokia would be able to work with AT&T to carry one of the new Symbian devices announced at Nokia World in September. A developer contest held by Nokia tipped off the possibility of a new Nokia device on AT&T, mainly because AT&T was a key sponsor. Now it looks like that plan has either fallen through or been postponed, at best. And that hurts Nokia because its Symbian devices aren’t subsidized, nor do they receive any marketing attention here in the States. This means most consumers don’t know about them, and when they do find out that Nokia has something to offer, they’re put off by prices of $500 or more.

Based on my prior conversations with key Nokia executives, I suspect this is just another set-back, and not a completely closed door. The U.S. market is extremely important to Nokia, I was told back in June by Niklas Savander, EVP and general manager of the markets unit at Nokia. If AT&T won’t play nice with Nokia, then perhaps the largest handset maker in the world in terms of sales can get T-Mobile to offer subsidized Symbian smartphones.

I think the devices have excellent hardware designs, but are lacking in usability. If Nokia can get a carrier to work with them, it will be up to U.S. consumers to pass their own judgment in a world of iPhones and Androids.

Image courtesy of Eldar Murtazin

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Amazon Web Services, which popularized cloud computing with its Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service, has moved up the stack from infrastructure to providing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, its Platform-as-a-Service play. However, Amazon is layering its PaaS offering on top of its other services in a way that’s easily reversed, which means developers can take the easy way out of developing on Beanstalk, or they can peel back the platform to manually provision and tweak their underlying VMs if they want.

Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, says the service was built to address the idea of vendor lock-in and inflexibility that commonly afflicts other platforms for application development. With the first efforts, Amazon is providing a framework for folks to build Java apps on AWS with other programming languages and partnerships to follow. It’s not surprising, given the attention that Platforms-as-a-Service have been getting in the last 12 months or so. At the beginning of last year, Microsoft finally opened up its Azure platform, while a few months later, VMware and Salesforce.com teamed up to offer VMforce, a Java cloud hosted on Salesforce’s infrastructure, and VMware eased into the PaaS market in other ways this year. Google amped up its App Engine offering, tying it to Salesforce and VMware, while smaller providers of Platforms-as-a-Service such as Makara and Heroku were snapped up (by Red Hat and Salesforce respectively).

For Amazon, long the leader in the cloud space, seeing competitors move up the stack and developers taking advantage of those platforms that weren’t necessarily built on AWS infrastructure was a warning. As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote back in May (GigaOM Pro sub req’d):

So, my question is this: If AWS really will be simplifying management within the coming weeks, what are the chances it does so via a PaaS offering of sorts? It would be wise for AWS to leverage its current leads in market and mind share and preempt any serious momentum by PaaS providers. Technically, they’re not competitors yet (to the degree that IaaS and PaaS can vary differently in terms of target audience), but the next generation of PaaS offerings will blur those lines. AWS has the tools to build a holistic PaaS offering, the economies of scale to make it profitable, and the SDKs to cater to specific set of developers. If it does so, the cloud-computing discussion will take on an entirely different tenor as PaaS providers scramble to differentiate themselves from AWS in this area, too.

Amazon’s Beanstalk offering has taken longer to launch than the few weeks Derrick had hoped for, but now it’s here. Amazon’s next move will be expanding beyond Java, something it could do via partnerships with other providers or on its own. Brian White, a developer with AWS, said PHP and Ruby are high on Amazon’s list, but declined to specify how partnerships with other providers might look. When asked about competing with other PaaS providers who host their platforms on AWS infrastructure, Selipsky suggested that perhaps those might become partners for supporting other languages.

Indeed, in its press release on Beanstalk, Amazon included a quote from John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard, saying the company is working with Amazon to provide a Ruby on Rails offering on Beanstalk. So will Amazon be a giant lumbering down the beanstalk to crush the PaaS competition, and will it lift others up to its height?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Melody.

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We had a phenomenal holiday quarter with record Mac, iPhone and iPad sales. We are firing on all cylinders and we’ve got some exciting things in the pipeline for this year including iPhone 4 on Verizon which customers can’t wait to get their hands on.

The resurgent Mac also set a new sales record: 4.13 million units, breaking last quarter’s record of 3.9 million, and more than 750,000 Macs than the company sold a year ago. To put that number into even greater perspective, Apple sold 4.5 million Macs during all of 2005. Nine months after the launch of the iPad, it appears concerns of Mac cannibalization are groundless, though concern for desktop Macs might be warranted.

In 2010, two out of three Macs sold were laptops. For the first quarter of this fiscal year, Mac laptops represented 70 percent of sales. Mac desktop sales were actually down year-over-year, from 1.23 million to 1.28 million, while laptops surged to 2.9 million during the holiday quarter. While Apple doesn’t break out sales by individual model, the new MacBook Air appears to be having an impact. Apple has indeed become the “mobile devices company” Steve Jobs described last January during the iPad introduction, and the iPod remains the best-selling of Apple’s mobile devices.

Apple sold 19.4 million iPods in the first quarter, compared to nearly 21 million last year, a decrease of 7 percent. For the last four years, Apple has regularly sold between 20 and 25 million iPods during the holidays, indicating the iPod may have reached market saturation. Revenue, which had been increasing despite decreasing sales, is now flat, up just 1 percent. While Apple also doesn’t break out iPods by model, it’s been thought that increasing sales of the higher-priced iPod touch were offsetting an overall iPod sales decline. The change in revenue may indicate that the combination of the iPhone and the iPad are negatively impacting iPod touch sales.

As for the iPhone, after selling 14.1 million units during the first full quarter of iPhone 4 availability (July through September), Apple sold 16.2 million iPhones during the holidays. That’s up an astonishing 86 percent year-over-year, and since 2008, iPhone sales have approximately doubled during each subsequent year’s first quarter. The iPhone earned nearly $10.5 billion for Apple, some 40 percent of all revenue.

Looking forward to next quarter, it’s hard to imagine Apple beating sales for the last two quarters, especially since the next iPhone isn’t expected to arrive until June or July. However, Apple will have the Verizon iPhone, and could finally manage to ship the white iPhone, so another record quarter is possible.

Another sequential record quarter is a little harder to imagine for the iPad. Launched just over nine months ago, the iPad sold 7.33 million units during the holiday quarter, up from 4.19 million the previous quarter. It appears the iPad, like the iPod, has great seasonal cache as a Christmas present. That makes one wonder if the yearly launch may at some point be moved from spring to fall, when new iPods are traditionally unveiled.

That question may come up during Apple’s conference call today, along with the expected queries about Steve Jobs and his medical leave of absence. As always, TheAppleBlog will have highlights and commentary immediately following the call.

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The agreement with Verizon has three implications, with the first being that Bandwidth.com now knows what it will pay to terminate VoIP calls to landlines, which will help it build out a stable cost basis for its business and thus help other VoIP companies it serves do the same. Much like the agreement with the SoundExchange helped Pandora, the online radio station, figure out the costs of providing streaming music to users so it could build out a business model to support itself, this agreement helps Bandwidth.com and other VoIP providers by setting a baseline cost. David Morken, CEO of Bandwidth.com, says he’s in talks with another major wireline provider to sign a similar deal.

The agreement could also help Verizon, which also has a lot of VoIP traffic on its network, pay lower rates to rural telephone companies. Verizon has to pay other telecommunications providers to terminate its VoIP calls, and in some places, it pays almost a half-cent per minute to do so. By publicizing this agreement, Verizon has told the world what it’s charging others, and said what it wants to pay. Expect rural providers to experience pressure from Verizon to bring their VoIP termination fees down to this $0.0007 cent level. From a research note issued today by investment research firm Stifel Nicolaus:

In the absence of reform, we believe Verizon and others are looking to put downward pressure on intercarrier compensation in the marketplace. Verizon is disputing rural carrier collection of access charges for connecting VoIP calls while attempting to negotiate deals, including the one with Bandwidth.com, that move the industry toward lower rates.

The third implication has to do with the somewhat esoteric world of regulation and telecommunications law. The FCC has never ruled on intercarrier compensation rates for VoIP services, because it has never decided if VoIP is a telecommunications service like wireline telephone or an information service like email. Obviously, folks don’t have to pay $0.0007 cents to send an email, although email doesn’t really cross from an IP network to an analog world unless the recipient has dial-up. This private agreement classifies VoIP as an information service and sets a rate — something the FCC hasn’t yet done for VoIP calls. So while the FCC has decades of rate setting and compensation agreements for voice traffic, it has never made the leap to set rates for VoIP. This has left the Verizons and other telcos of the world able to set prices, and the market for VoIP to develop in a way that’s vastly different from the market for email.

So this rather dull-sounding agreement is a big deal for companies like Google, Skype, Twilio and Bandwidth.com, as well as for rural telcos and the FCC. If the FCC decides to make a decision on VoIP interconnection fees rates this year, as some sources have said it will, then Morken says he can let the agreement expire (or not) depending on what the rules say. For Bandwidth.com, which has gone from operating 1 million numbers at the end of 2009 to 17 million numbers today, the agreement is like a hedge against higher prices and regulatory uncertainty that Morken can use to build his business.

With $100 million in annual revenue, up from $85 million the year before, Bandwidth.com is growing well without ever having taken on venture investment. The company, which is profitable, expects to file to go public within the next 18 months, said Morken. We’ve covered the business in December 2009, and I think as an infrastructure provider for VoIP services, Bandwidth.com can sell itself as a credible VoIP platform. Contracts like this only reinforce that legitimacy, although should the FCC declare VoIP an information service, I suppose the contract could become a cost burden other providers wouldn’t have to deal with.

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The OneNote Mobile for iPhone app is just one piece of software that helps users sync their notes to a Windows Live Skydrive account. But it may signal that potentially more Microsoft productivity apps will come to iOS. There are other third-party mobile productivity options available, like Documents To Go, but few are as popular as Word and Excel. If you listen to the words of Takeshi Numoto, corporate VP for Microsoft Office, those apps may not be far off either.

“As new pieces of technology — new browsers, mobile hardware, smart phones and social networks — become bigger parts of (people’s) lives, they expect familiar technology, like Office, to help them access their ideas wherever they are. Today’s release is another step in Office evolving to serve our 750 million customers worldwide. Whether it’s on a PC or Mac, a mobile phone, or online through the Office Web Apps on multiple browsers, we continue to bring Office to the devices, platforms, and operating systems our customers are using. It should be about the ideas and information, not the device, right?,” Numoto wrote on the Microsoft Office blog.

Now, Numoto’s statement doesn’t exactly commit Microsoft to future productivity apps on iOS devices, but it suggests Microsoft is getting used the idea that embracing iOS might be advantageous. If it’s all about the software, then it makes sense not to preclude popular non-Microsoft platforms such as iOS. With Google also pushing hard to make its Docs program more powerful on mobile, with full editing now, it’s logical for Microsoft to look at unleashing more Office mobile apps before iPhone and iPad users get used to working with Google Docs (or iWorks, for that matter) on their devices. It all jibes with an earlier report that Microsoft was looking at bringing Office to Nokia and “other leading smartphone platforms.”

Microsoft will need time to build up Windows Phone 7 as a major mobile competitor, but it has valuable assets in its Office products that can help the company be relevant in mobile if it thinks beyond its own mobile platform. Users would love to be able to have their Word documents available from a desktop, from the cloud and on mobile devices. Now Microsoft just has to get with the program.

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The Washington Post says the decision was a 4-to-1 split, and according to The Wrap, the $30 billion deal will close at the end of the month.

A statement released by the FCC details the following conditions for the deal, which include:

• Ensuring Reasonable Access to Comcast-NBCU Programming for Multichannel Distribution, which means the FCC is improving its arbitration process for issues involving Comcast-NBC programming.
• Protecting Diversity, Localism, Broadcast and Other Public Interest Concerns, which includes venture capital for minority start-ups.
  
• Broadband Adoption and Deployment, which includes measures like creating a program to offer low-income families cheap broadband service.
• Protecting access to Comcast’s distribution systems, including a provision to offer “10 new independent channels within eight years on its digital tier.”
• Localism, which is directed at making sure NBC and Telemundo stations maintain or expand the current level of news and information programming.
• The increased availability of children’s programming.
• The increased expansion of Spanish-language programming, including availability on Comcast’s on demand and online platforms.
• The safeguarding of public, educational and governmental programming.

Here’s the big one, though: Protecting the Development of Online Competition, which includes the following sub-points:

• Offers its video programming to legitimate OVDs on the same terms and conditions that would be available to an MVPD.
• Makes comparable programming available on economically comparable prices, terms, and conditions to an OVD that has entered into an arrangement to distribute programming from one or more of
  Comcast-NBCU’s peers.
• Offers standalone broadband Internet access services at reasonable prices and of sufficient bandwidth so that customers can access online video services without the need to purchase a cable television subscription from Comcast.
• Does not enter into agreements to unreasonably restrict online distribution of its own video programming or programming of other providers.
• Does not disadvantage rival online video distribution through its broadband Internet access services and/or set-top boxes.
• Does not exercise corporate control over or unreasonably withhold programming from Hulu.

The language is strong, but the loopholes and omissions in these conditions will undoubtedly become clear over the next few months. According to FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps in his dissenting statement:

In sum, this is simply too much, too big, too powerful, too lacking in benefits for American consumers and citizens. I have respect for the business acumen of the applicants, and have no doubts that they will strive to make Comcast-NBCU a financial success. But simply blessing business deals is not the FCC’s statutorily-mandated job. Our job is to determine whether the record here demonstrates that this new media giant will serve the public interest.

Picture courtesy of Flickr user kevinwburkett.

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“Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so,” wrote Douglas Purdy, director of developer relations on the Facebook developer blog.

The move suggests that Facebook is learning that it needs to tread more carefully with user information and is being more responsive to privacy concerns. Facebook introduced the change on late Friday night, making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible as part of its User Graph. The change would expose a person’s contact information to a third-party developer but would not release a user’s friends’ information. Facebook said the new feature would allows users to easily share their address and mobile phone in order to streamline the checkout process at a shopping site or obtain timely mobile alerts on special deals.

But the update touched off concerns that the permission system did not do a good enough job in explaining how much sensitive data was about to shared. In a worst-case scenario, some worried the new feature would further enable rogue applications to spam Facebook users and could prompt potential identity theft.

Now, Facebook is backing away from the move until it can come up with a better approach to this change. It may not be anything significant but it could represent more steps in the permission flow to highlight the sensitive data being shared. Right now, a lot of Facebook users blindly click through the permissions, something some developers can take advantage of. As it moves to make more information available, it makes sense for Facebook to go out of its way to ensure that its users are fully aware of how much access they’re granting third-party apps and websites. It not only protects those users but it signals that Facebook is concerned about its users’ privacy, something many are not quite convinced of. We’ll know in a few weeks if Facebook is actually taking a more thoughtful approach to information sharing and its permission system, or if it’s just waiting for some of the latest controversy to die down.

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This is the email from Steve Jobs, which was released by Apple in its entirety as a press release:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

This isn’t the first time Jobs has had to step away from the company due to health concerns. On Jan. 14 2009, Jobs stepped down as CEO temporarily, also citing health issues. The news also came in the form of a personal email from Jobs to Apple employees. This second leave comes almost exactly two years after the first. At the beginning of that earlier leave, Jobs anticipated a summer return to the company. This time, his plans seem much less definite.

It was later revealed that Jobs left to have a liver transplant in April of 2009. Critics argued that by keeping the specifics of his health issues hidden, he was hiding material information from investors and damaging the company. Stock prices initially suffered following the news of Jobs’ first absence, and the same can probably be expected this time around. Stock values are already down in European trading.

While this is most definitely bad news for the Apple CEO, we wish him a speedy recovery.

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Last September, the online video site launched an alpha test of its YouTube Live service to great fanfare, highlighting two days of live streaming events with four content partners. But those tests didn’t go as smoothly as planned; none of its partners generated very many views during the alpha run, and viewers that did show up were often struck by low-quality, jittery streams. In short, even though it was YouTube’s initial test of a new technology, the site’s first foray into running live streams on its own architecture ended up being a bit of an embarrassment.

So one can understand why in its second round of tests, the online video powerhouse has to remain mum, allowing partners to take the lead on announcing their own live streams instead. While YouTube isn’t talking up these beta test of the live technology, it’s currently working with partners for another round of tests.

The latest round of new partners using the updated YouTube Live technology included the Vlogbrothers, which streamed their Project 4 Awesome live show on YouTube before the holidays late last year. But the biggest test of the YouTube Live infrastructure will come next week, when Revision3 live streams its ultra-popular DiggNation show live from its studios on Tuesday, Jan. 18 at 6:00 p.m. PT/9:00 p.m. ET.

In a phone interview, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback said he was excited to be part of the beta test, which will open up new live streaming possibilities for the company and its flagship show. DiggNation, even when it’s on tour or part of a live event, has always been shot-to-tape and uploaded for on-demand viewing later. As a result, Louderback says next week’s show will be the first time DiggNation has streamed the show live in North America. (Revision3 had once streamed DiggNation live from Amsterdam as part of The Next Web conference back in 2008.)

The DiggNation live stream won’t just be a big step up in terms of expected audience for the live streaming product; it should also represent a step up in production values for YouTube Live partners. For next week’s show, Louderback said the DiggNation crew will have a three-camera switched environment and will include all the same types of effects and drop-ins that are available as part of its on-demand shows.

While DiggNation isn’t the only Revision3 show that will take advantage of the YouTube Live partnership, Louderback wouldn’t provide many details on what else the company had in store. What he did tell us is that his company doesn’t currently have any plans to take any of its shows live on a regular schedule, but that it would consider it the possibility depending on audience reaction.

“It’s all about audience feedback,” Louderback said. “We’ll try anything… and if we get a good response we’ll keep doing it.”

Louderback said he had seen the Project 4 Awesome live stream and was impressed with the video quality, so he has high hopes for Revision3′s own live streams. YouTube is also hopeful that it has worked out the kinks in the months since its first test of YouTube Live.

“The idea is that we push things into the market… get feedback, iterate and improve them,” a YouTube spokesperson said when asked about the company’s rollout of the live product. He admitted the alpha test was not without its glitches, but said the company has been hard at work fixing those glitches and is hopeful that future tests will show improvements over time.

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A successful public offering by Boingo would bring more attention to the IPO market, which has been cool lately but is starting to heat up again. Word that Groupon was preparing for a possible $15 million IPO has set tongues wagging and hopes high that 2011 will be a big year.

Boingo runs a worldwide, commercial, Wi-Fi network, consisting of over 211,000 hotspots in 100 countries. The company said it has direct relationships with over 1.3 million users who’ve paid for mobile Internet services in the past year. The company increased revenue from $56.7 million in 2008 to $65.7 million in 2009 and recorded $59 in revenue million through September 2010. The company also made $5.7 million through the first nine months of last year after posting a loss for the same period the year before.

Boingo is looking to take advantage of the boom in wireless devices that need connectivity. The Wi-Fi provider is also positioning itself as a partner for cellular carriers as they look to offload some of their data needs on Boingo’s network. The company said some of the risks it faces is its dependence on venue partners, who may not perform well or may shut out Boingo, limiting expansion plans. The company must also adapt to new wireless technologies that could affect consumers reliance on Wi-Fi.

The IPO is good news overall and suggests Wi-Fi is going to play a big role in the coming mobile boom. Even with the roll out of 4G, Wi-Fi is going to be a critical part of the wireless story.

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The Problem

A website address like gigaom.com is actually an easy-to-remember alias or nickname for a numeric address like 74.200.247.61. (GigaOM actually has several, to deal with the traffic that the website receives.) These addresses can be in the range 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. Because some of the possible numbers are reserved, there are theoretically somewhat over 4 billion internet addresses available under this system, which is known as IPv4.

Unfortunately, it’s been known for some time that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses. By some measures, only 2 percent of the available addresses remain, and they will be exhausted in mid-February, in just over a month.

So the internet will need to move to IPv6 addresses, which will give us a bunch more possibilities: 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 of them, in fact. There’s some great information available if you want details.

Getting Ready

A lot of the infrastructure of the internet will need to be updated in order to support IPv6, but very little of it has yet been deployed. It won’t be possible to make the transition to “native IPv6″ in the time available. Therefore, a number of short-term fixes are in the works, but the FCC, in a recent paper [PDF], calls them “kludges.”

The short term solutions are necessary because there is not enough time to completely migrate the entire public Internet to “native IPv6″ where end users can communicate entirely via IPv6….These kludges include more efficient use of the IPv4 address resource, conservation, and the sharing of IPv4  addresses through the use of Network Address Translation (NAT).  While these provide partial mitigation for IPv4 exhaustion, they are not a long-term solution, increase network costs, and merely postpone some of the consequences of address exhaustion without solving the underlying problem.

Most users won’t see any immediate effects when the IPv4 addresses run out. But large site operators, like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo, will be affected, so they have agreed to test their readiness for IPv6, or at least the short-term solutions being worked on today, on June 8. In the long term, major infrastructure upgrades will be needed. As the FCC paper says:

[T]he short-term solutions are problematic. The “solution to the solution” is to complete the transition to a native IPv6 network. A native IPv6 network will restore end-to-end connectivity with a vastly expanded address space, will improve network performance, and should decrease costs. Completing the transition of the public Internet to IPv6 will take time.

As for the rest of us, we probably won’t need to do anything in the near future. It will be up to our internet service providers to make the necessary changes to their systems. A few people may need to reconfigure routers and VPNs, and web hosts will need to add some new DNS records.

If you’re interested, you can test your connection here. But don’t worry if you get results like this one.

It just means that your ISP hasn’t assigned you an IPv6 address yet, which will be true for almost everyone.

By the way, Google and Facebook will still be available via the current IPv4 system on and after June 8. So don’t panic. You’ll probably hear from your ISP in coming months, but it’s unlikely that you’ll lose service.

How are you and your colleagues preparing for IPv6?

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