<![CDATA[ The New York Times says that several airlines are testing in-flight Internet services. JetBlue will apparently be offering free, but crippled service that includes only email and instant messaging. And Crunchgear suggests it will be even more crippled than that: only Yahoo! and BlackBerry-based mail and IM will be supported. For a lot of travelers (including me) that will be completely useless, although I guess something is better than nothing. At the opposite extreme, American (along with Alaska Air) is reportedly working on full-featured Internet access that will allow you to use the applications of your choice, but it will apparently cost around $10. The Times also notes the most intriguing possibility for this service: that Internet access may mean the ability to make VoIP-based phone calls. It's not clear that the Internet connection will be good enough to make phone calls practical initially, but as technology advances, it's only a matter of time before there's enough bandwidth to make calls practical.

The Times calls this a „pitfall“ and says that American won't permit Internet-based phone calls. But I have trouble imagining that ban sticking. Once it becomes technologically feasible to make calls, it will be extremely difficult for airlines to enforce a no-calls rule. There's no automated way to block phone calls, and stewardesses will have a difficult time policing the activities of dozens of passengers. The only way it would work is if the caller's neighbor was willing to rat him out, and I suspect that fellow passengers are a lot more opposed to the idea of cell phones on airplanes in the abstract than they would be about an actual cell phone caller in the seat next to them. After all, cell phone calls are commonplace on buses and trains, and while they're occasionally annoying, they're no more annoying than a loud real-life conversation or a crying baby. There's no groundswell of support for banning cell phone calls on public transit, despite the fact that the annoyance factor is exactly the same. One possibility is that we'd see different airlines cater to different customers, with some airlines aggressively prohibiting airplane-based phone calls and others allowing them. My guess is that business travelers, who generate a disproportionate share of airline revenues, will find the ability to get work done on the airplane to be worth the minor inconvenience of occasionally having to listen to a neighbor's phone call, and so airlines that permit calls will be more profitable.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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We opened up nominations for the upcoming Crunchies Awards a week ago. In that week, over 13,000 nomina­tions have been cast, for thousands of startups and products.

Nominations stay open until midnight December 12. At that time, we’ll take a day or two to tally the results, remove any spam and fraudulent votes, and the top five nominees in each category will go up for a general vote. The winners will be announced on January 18 at a ceremony at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

Remember that some of the awards are specific to new 2007 products startups. Others (most of them) are more general and aren’t tied to the launch date of the company.

Tickets will be made available soon. The theater holds nearly 1,000 people, and there will be a big party afterwards.

The competition would not be possible without our sponsors. Thanks to Sun Microsystems Business Analytics, Microsoft and Charles River Ventures for sponsoring the Crunchies. Contact us if you’re interested to sponsor an award or other part of the evening festivities.

If you are a startup and want to encourage your users to nominate you, blog and website badges are available here.

And rememeber that this is not solely a TechCrunch effort. We are partnering with GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat on this as well.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

<![CDATA[ Macrovision, a company that's well known for its DRM products, made quite a splash today with its announced plans to buy Gemstar-TV Guide for $2.8 billion. The rationale for the deal seems to be that the folks at Macrovision may actually believe the commonly stated myth that DRM „opens new business models.“ Macrovision talks about how combining its DRM with Gemstar listings and content could enable a bunch of new offerings – but it's difficult to believe those new offerings will be particularly compelling. DRM has never been about enabling new business models, but about making any content less valuable by limiting its usefulness in the hopes of being able to charge separately for each use. Perhaps that's what they mean by „new business models“ but it's hardly a business model if it's simply pissing off consumers. As Saul Hansell at the NY Times notes, the direction Macrovision seems to be moving in is (along with the recent story of hard drives that block MP3 sharing) one where technology companies feel that they need to be policing how people use content. That's a very anti-consumer position to be in – and it's generally not a good business proposition to be focused on limiting consumers. Apparently, investors agree – as they've sent the stock price of both companies way down in reaction to the deal.

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<![CDATA[ Back during the big debate over the need for new laws against „camcording“ a movie in Canada, Michael Geist pointed out that existing laws were already perfectly fine in dealing with the problem. Of course, despite all of that, the power of the movie industry lobbyists was too strong and the bill still became law. So, isn't interesting to find out (via Geist again) that a recent arrest for camcording in a movie theater didn't even happen under the new law, but under the old copyright law. So, once again, can someone explain why the MPAA needed that new law and why Canadian politicians agreed to it?

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<![CDATA[ Are you familiar with the horror movie Candyman? In it, naive victims-to-be summon the titular character by repeating his name five times while staring into a mirror. Unpleasantness ensues.

Strangely enough, the exact same phenomenon applies to Republican presidential contender Ron Paul. But you'll need a web browser instead of a mirror, and you only need to say his name once.

The online omnipresence of Paul's supporters is impressive to the point of being terror-inducing. Virtually any online poll in which Paul appears can be counted on to swing wildly in his favor — in the wake of one such incident, the National Journal begged Paul's supporters „please stop emailing us.“ Stories involving Dr. Paul make it to the front page of Digg on a daily basis, and any blog post that triggers a Google Alert for his name is sure to see a flood of comments arrive shortly thereafter.

Now some of his supporters have been caught promoting their preferred candidate using decidedly unsavory means. SecureWorks has released a report detailing the mechanisms behind a four day pro-Paul spam flood (one that we noted back on November 1). Apparently a botnet was employed to send unsolicited emails via infected computers, in much the same illegal style that's used to hawk pirated software and disc0unt v1agra.

Dirty pool, to be sure — and foolish on the part of the Paul fans behind it. The spam and rigged online polls aren't fooling anyone, and only make it easier to dismiss the campaign's online prominence as a the work of a handful of talented geeks. But there's no CPAN module that lets you create a blimp via Perl script; most of the pro-Paul comments left around the net contain enough context that they appear to have been written by actual humans; and incidents like the one that occurred at the San Francisco Republican Straw Poll make it clear that Paul's campaign has some real grassroots support behind it. I'm not buying Ron Paul contracts on Intrade just yet, but it would be nice to see his online armies knock off the transparent internet antics and start channeling their energy toward more productive — or at least dignified — ends. Unfortunately, as my fellow Techdirt Insight Community member and blogger Tim Lee has discussed elsewhere, the odds of this happening don't seem to be very good.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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When Oliver Starr (former MobileCrunch writer) attacked employer Sam Sethi (former TechCrunch UK writer), the person who currently controls Blognation, in a 3,000 word diatribe, a lot of people came to the conclusion that Blognation was dead in the water.

The chain of screw ups was just too long. Sethi had an emotional explosion and threatened to kill his cofounder over a legal dispute. He reportedly lied to his editors flat out that he’d raised a £1 million (more here) so that they’d continue to work for free. He allegedly forged bank transfer documents to stall for time. To sum things up, even when Sethi had something truthful to say, he apparently lied anyway just to make things more interesting.

But he may raise an angel round of funding anyway, and keep Blognation alive for a few more months. We have been emailed a draft term sheet that shows the willingness of Secora PLC, a London based company, to invest £250,000 for 25% of Blognation. Payments would be made in stages, with £130,000 payable as soon as the deal closes. This may or may not be an authentic document. I’ve emailed Secora for comment.

If the deal closes, Secora will prove itself to be an investor with a backbone. Not many entities would back a startup with this much baggage.

Putting Sethi aside, this is good news. Mostly because the 13 or so Blognation blog editors, some of whom are reportedly due as much as 30,000 Euros for past work, were looking at a bleak holiday season. Now, at least, they may be able to put food on the table and buy gifts for their children.

<![CDATA[ Yesterday we posted on the no-discussion-necessary rapid approval of the SAFE Act, and highlighted some of the more questionable problems in the bill. While the post was pretty clear about why we (and others) believed it covered WiFi (the broadly worded language in the bill, which we had in the post), we've been getting some emails from folks who say that we twisted the legislation out of context. It probably doesn't help that whoever submitted our post to Digg (and got it Dugg onto the front page) did so in a misleading way, making it sound like our post said something it did not. However, with so much interest in this bill, it's worth digging a little deeper. The bill's author quickly responded to the charges by saying that it wasn't intended to cover open WiFi networks, but the bill itself doesn't make that clear – and the courts tend to go by the text of the law, rather than intent (intent can be helpful, but it's much less important). The author of the original article has a clarifying conversation with the author of the bill, asking him if he'll change the text to make it clear that open WiFi is not covered – and he gets no promises. Instead, in typical „protect the children“ fashion, the guy just goes on about what an awful problem this is. The thing is, no one is denying that child pornography is a terrible thing. What we're worried about is incredibly broadly worded bills that were clearly written and approved in a hurry with little oversight, and which do not appear to take into account the unintended consequences of what they're putting into law.

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<![CDATA[ Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to take a „plant tour“ at the Wall Street Journal's Palo Alto printing plant. It really was fascinating to learn how the paper is printed. There is a lot of technology involved – though, much of it is rather old. The process of getting photo images of each page layout, etching them onto plates and then using those plates to print the pages is really impressive. In touring through the operation, it made me appreciate both how much effort goes into printing the newspaper each day and how much capital costs newspapers have sunk into existing printing processes which must make it difficult for them to adapt. They really do have the process down to quite a science. The problem, though, is that the science part means that the only changes they're making are really about making the process itself cheaper or more efficient. For example, they're switching over from sending the layouts via satellite to sending them over the internet and the machines that develop the „negatives“ used for each plate have become progressively more advanced and efficient over time (our tour guide noted that the machines we saw were the „3rd generation“ since he'd started there a long time ago, and the original machines took up half a room). Also, the Wall Street Journal, like many newspapers, have shifted to a smaller format that both saves newsprint costs and is much easier to use in the printing process.

However, with all this focus on efficiency, will more creative ideas on how to make a better product get left behind? We've talked about how newspapers need to stop thinking of themselves as being newspapers and focus more on being news organizations who can provide both useful data and analysis that people can use as they need it. For the most part, it seemed likely that newsprint itself didn't fit all that well into that world. However, having just seen how the printing process works, it was interesting to read this article over at E-Media Tidbits that notes that there are new printing presses available today that could print totally custom newspapers. The technology would actually allow every newspaper printed to be different, so you could customize the printed paper to each subscriber's in­terests. It's a slightly different process than the existing one, basically using very fast inkjet printers rather than the traditional plate method, but it can still print about 30,000 papers an hour (if I remember correctly – and I might not – the WSJ folks said they can print 60,000 per hour). Of course, it would involve changing the current printing process, and not for efficiency's sake, but to make the product itself more appealing.

The question, though, is whether or not the newspaper industry is willing to go in that direction, making a better product, rather than just a cheaper one? With so much pressure on the industry from its investors to cut costs or to just focus on digital distribution, it seems difficult to believe that investors will be happy with plans to buy new printing press technology that isn't quite as fast and uses more expensive ink. Of course, all of that leaves aside the question of whether or not an individually customized newspaper really is compelling enough to make that kind of investment worthwhile. The problem might be that it's only interesting to people on the margin. Kids who have grown up „net native“ see no reason to use a paper newspaper at all – no matter how customized. Newspaper loyalists are still perfectly happy with their non-customized papers anyway. So it's just those folks in-between – and it might not be worth it to make all these changes just to satisfy that group.

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Google Docs and Spreadsheets has hit a bit of a growth curve since June. About 1.6 million people used the Web-based service in October, compared to 635,000 in June, according to Compete. That is a nice jump, but 1.6 million is still a marginal number compared to the desktop productivity apps (on just about every PC) that it is trying to replace. But, hey, it is still early days.

Notice in the reproduced chart below that Google Spreadsheets seems to be a tad more popular than Google Docs. The same trend is true on average time spent on each app (8 minutes per month for Spreadsheets, versus 6 minutes for Docs). For right now, I think that online Spreadsheets are the more compelling app. I use Google Spreadsheets on occasion to organize conferences and such, but have yet to write anything on Google Docs other than to test out the service.

I think that is because the utility of these services is as a collaboration tool and spreadsheets offer a way to structure information that lends itself to that type of usage. For documents, it is more often a read-only experience, for which e-mailing the document still works. If I do need to collaborate on a document, I do it in an online editor that is also a publishing system (Wordpress).

Beyond these numbers, what I’d like to see is a comparison to other online productivity apps from Zoho, Glide (which recently came out with a spreadsheet that works offline and syncs to the Web), and others.

Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Compete sent me comparable numbers for Zoho, Officelive, and Thinkfree, and Zimbra. (see second chart below). Google Docs and Spreadsheets dominates on monthly uniques. For November 2007, it had 1.6 million, versus 133,000 for Zoho, 168,000 for Officelive (which really isn’t a competing product yet), 46,000 for Zimbra (also not fully comparable since that is an e-mail client mostly), and 18,000 for Thinkfree. On a more apples-to-apples comparison, Zoho Writer had 31,000 unique visitors in November, versus 677,000 for Google Docs alone. Zoho Sheets had 12,000 users versus 694,000 for Google Spreadsheets. So even Google is leading by a mile here.

But Google cannot sit on its haunches. When you look at pageviews, Officelive, which is still a joke (although that will be changing soon), actually beats Google Docs with 4.8 million versus 3.5 million for November. Google Spreadsheets had 7.5 million pageviews, and Google Docs and Spreadsheets (including Presentations) had 17.3 million. (See third chart below, followed by a table with the corresponding pageview numbers).

₀_1197116678“,„zo­ho“); ₁_1197116678“,„tran­smedia“); ₂_1197116678“,„li­vedocuments“);

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

<![CDATA[ There's no question that Facebook's Beacon initiative has taken a beating over the past few weeks. The feature automatically collected and published users' activities at partner sites, and almost immediately attracted criticism. MoveOn launched a campaign in opposition to Beacon. Horror stories of accidentally disclosed purchases — like engagement ring purchases and Christmas presents — began to circulate. The early word was decidedly negative, prompting some partners to begin to jump ship. Facebook has weathered similar storms before: its minifeed feature was met with a hostile reception, but is now emulated by virtually every new social network. But this time they caved: on Wednesday founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a rather contrite blog post:

We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

…

Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely.

It remains to be seen whether users will opt out en masse — there are indications that many may still not be aware of Beacon. But the negative press seems likely to scare away potential partners. So while it would be premature to declare Beacon a failure, it seems very unlikely that it will ever achieve its intended net-spanning potential.

I think there are three reasons why this happened. First, Beacon's simply not a feature that people — as opposed to companies — were clamoring for. Facebook noticed its users expressing opinions about products and saw a great opportunity to make money. But they couldn't resist removing the messily inefficient human portion of the opinion-expression process. Unfortunately, users didn't get much value from having that process automated.

Second, and perhaps most obviously, Facebook bungled the deployment of the feature. As Zuckerberg admits in the above-linked post, the company didn't think hard enough about how users would respond, and was too slow to react to how they did.

But the third factor may be the most problematic for Facebook: they're just too big. I don't mean to call MoveOn's anti-Beacon campaign dishonest, but it's not exactly in keeping with the organization's sty­le. It's hard to imagine they'd have undertaken the effort if there wasn't plenty of free press attention to be had by attacking Facebook. The social network has achieved a level of popular attention that makes them an attractive target (and, if you subscribe to the nightclub theory of social networking, one that could presage a no-one-goes-there-because-it's-too-crowded problem).

Of course it would be silly to spend too much time doomsaying — the site's pageviews continue to grow at a healthy clip. But in the wake of the partial collapse of Beacon, it's hard to imagine Facebook launching another initiative as ambitious — and it's even harder to imagine them launching one successfully.

Tom Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tom Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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