GigaOM

Shutdown: Mygazines, a web site that allowed folks to share digital copies of magazines, has shut down. It was sued by magazine publishers and later settled. It was a bad idea to begin with, no surprise it is gone. (Folio)

Shutdown: Skyrider, a P2P software company, has apparently shuttered its doors after treading water for a very long time. (NewTeeVee)

Restructured: Tesla chairman and investor Elon Musk has taken over as CEO of the company, is cutting staff and scaling back ambitious plans. (Earth2Tech)

Restructured: Twitter has swapped the roles of its CEO and chairman — Ev Williams is the new CEO, and Jack Dorsey is the chairman. No layoffs. (Twitter Blog)

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With the U.S. Presidential elections likely to be held in November 2008, two major candidates, Senators John McCain (Rep.) and Barack Obama (Dem.) debated issues around foreign policy yesterday. To mark the occasion, Current.tv, a citizen journalism-based TV network, teamed up with San Francisco-based Twitter to host a special event that allowed folks to participate in real time as the debate unfolded. 

Before the debate kicked off, Al Gore, former U.S. vice-president and a presidential candidate who co-founded Current TV along with Joel Hyatt, stopped by the TV network’s fancy digs. They are right across from AT&T Park and a stone’s throw from our more modest offices. 

GigaOM Network Managing Editor Carolyn Pritchard and yours truly stopped by. Twitter team was in attendance as well, and so were my friends Tekzilla co-host Veronica Belmont and Gdgt co-founder Ryan Block. David Galbraith, who is in town for a personal visit, was in attendance as well.  

I got a chance to exchange a few words with former V-P Gore, who was extremely warm and gracious and generous with his time. You can check out my photos from the event on Flickr, though they are not as good as Scott Beale’s always excellent photography.

Hulu is a problem. So argues a paper by University of Minnesota Professor Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, who says that video isn’t actually clogging the Net right now, but that streaming video content is such an inefficient way of getting video from one place to another that sites should find better options, such as faster-than-real-time streaming and buffering. The goal of the paper is to counter carrier assurances that they will protect video even without any mandated Network Neutrality. Odlyzko argues that such assurances might lead to special video pathways, but that’s not the Internet the market wants and needs.

Aside from Odlyzko’s attack on streaming, which he says comprises 9.6 percent of total web traffic during evening hours and has grown 169 percent year over year, the largest part of the paper is devoted to data that supports his conclusions that content, such as Internet radio and video, is worth less than connectivity such as voice or Twitter. People don’t pay for content, they pay for connectivity, says Odlyzko. Continue »

With the tech conference season upon us, Found|READ thought some tips for how to master conference marketing on the cheap would be useful. Today’s tips are courtesy of serial entrepreneur Pete Grillo, currently founder of iterasi, a one-and a-half-year-old startup in Portland, Ore., that has built a hosted storage service to capture and archive web pages. It’s a seemingly simple tool, but it allows you to save web pages in perpetuity — personal archives for individuals and businesses!

Iterasi had been living off angel funds since 2006, so even though Grillo’s investors might have been fine with a marketing blitz, Grillo didn’t feel like he could spend the $10,000 needed to get an iterasi booth at TechCrunch50 or sponsor a $5,000 dinner at last month’s Gnomedex. But iterasi was about to launch a new release, and Grillo recognized that an impactful marketing play would be necessary if it was to get noticed in a very noisy market.

So Grillo and his team came up with a non-traditional marketing tactic. They found an old yellow school bus with a dubious battery and an owner/driver who wanted to get to Gnomedex, too. Then they invited several bloggers, a dozen programmers and tech folks from the Portland area to ride along with them to Seattle.

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This past weekend at Word Camp 2008, we announced GigaOM Daily, a Twitter-style micro-newswire that is going to take editorial inputs from our team and our growing network of blogs. Some might call it the Twitterization of news. If you want to be super-simplistic, then you also can think of it as a constantly updating LiveBlog.

Inspired by the thinking behind Dave Winer’s concept of “river of news,” it is a reflection of the changing nature of news in our time-constrained life. Many of our readers and sources have lamented that they have to read the full story when the real information can be wrapped up in two lines. At the same time, I was finding that my growing network on Twitter was feeding me more interesting stories to read than I could find myself.

So why not combine the two and come up with a live microblog-based newswire? Bloomberg, Reuters and Dow Jones have been using headline and news alerts forever. Except now we can do this on the Internet, using an open source platform (WordPress) and some clever hackery. (More details, along with notes about current and future features, below the fold.)

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In my favorite movie, Wonder Boys, Prof. Grady Tripp is a writer who hasn’t had a best seller in years. His work in progress is a 1,500 page behemoth. Upon sneaking a peek at the magnum opus, one of Tripp’s most devoted students takes it upon herself to point out to the professor that some of his scenes suffer from overkill — being brought to life in such excruciating detail that they actually diminish the experience for the reader. The student accuses the professor of literary indecision.

We have a name for this in the software business, too. It’s called feature creep.

When your well-intentioned haiku of a software app turns into the Encyclopedia Britannica, you’ve lost your core focus, probably because you’ve given in to the temptation to answer this question in the affirmative, far too many times: “Wouldn’t it be great if our product did this?” Of course you want your product to be as good as it possibly can be, but the most successful applications (or literary masterpieces) actually require that you answer “No” more often than “Yes.” Continue »