As expected, EchoStar has filed with the SEC to split its business in two, reports GigaOm. The two businesses will be the Dish Network satellite TV service and its set-top box business. That set-top box business includes place-shifting Slingboxes, which Echostar acquired with its $380 million purchase of Sling Media in September.

The satellite TV business will change its name to DISH Network, and the TV technology company will be called EchoStar Holding Company. Charlie Ergen will remain CEO of both. My suggestion: Sell the satellite TV service to AT&T or some other buyer and buy TiVo (current market cap is $820 million). Then start selling combined TiVo-Slingboxes to all the cable and satellite TV companies. Make sure they all have Ethernet jacks to incorporate Internet TV services so that I can watch everything from Joost to Youtube and Hulu on my TV. That assumes Ergen can succeed in selling these boxes to cable companies, an area where TiVo has struggled. But his status as one of the old boys in the industry (remember when he was considered a maverick?), could help him win over the incumbents.

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The Web is coming to your airplane seat, real soon. And not just e-mail and IM on one JetBlue plane. Starting in March, I am told, American Airlines will start offering Web access on-board, followed shortly by Virgin America. Both will use an air-to-ground system from Aircell. (Boeing’s failed Connexion broadband in the air service, in contrast, was an unwieldy satellite system). Alaska Airlines also has plans to offer Web service next year, but I believe that is a satellite-based system as well.

Inside the plane, some of these will be Wi-Fi. Newer planes, like Virgin America’s, that already have Ethernet jacks at every seat, will have both wired and wireless connectivity. Both plan on charging $10 a flight for Web access. I know I’d pay that. But it could be worth a lot more to them to offer it for free, and use it to build loyalty. Virgin America, in particular, has more to gain by offering its Web access for free. I personally have already started flying Virgin America (AKA the Blogger’s Airline) just because I know I will have an electrical plug no matter what seat I get. If I could get free Internet access, I wouldn’t fly any other airline. I am sure there are enough other frequent flyers out there who feel the same. Enough to keep Virgin America’s planes full, which is the only way you make money in the airline business, not by squeezing another $10 from each passenger with a laptop or an iPhone. They can also subsidize the Internet access with ads.

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<![CDATA[ Last month's launch of Amazon's e-book reader, Kindle, has people talking about ebooks again, with some questioning whether or not the potential popularity of the reader combined with the ease of viewing unauthorized ebooks on it would lead to an increase in e-book „piracy.“ Reader Carolyn writes in to point to a terrific rant about how this assertion is misplaced. The writer, Kassia Krozser, notes that it's not the Kindle's fault that people will use unauthorized content – it's the fault of publishers for making it inconvenient for people to do what they want with content. It's the same thing that we said when JK Rowling refused to offer the Harry Potter books as ebooks out a fear of unauthorized copies getting out. That's ridiculous of course. In doing so, you guarantee that the only digital copies are unauthorized, even if someone wanted to pay for them. It's this thinking that helped screw up the recording industry as well. If the industry had recognized early on how Napster showed how people wanted to consume music, they could have offered a compelling solution that people would have paid for. Instead, they resisted and fought it, and now the problem is much worse. The problem isn't with the device, but with publishers not giving people the content in a format they want. As Krozser says (and we used for the headline of this post): „Devices don't make pirates. Unreasonable barriers make pirates.“

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Adult dating site AdultFriendFin­der, rumored to have been acquired in November for $1 billion is on the wrong side of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with a settlement that restricts AdultFriendFin­der’s promoti­onal activities.

The FTC said in a statement that AdultFriendFinder affiliates used pop-up ads to drive traffic to the site, and exposed consumers, including children to sexual explicit images when search for terms including “flowers,” “travel,” and “vacations.” More seriously the FTC alleged that the ads were also distributed with spyware and adware.

The FTC found that “the practice of displaying graphic pop-up ads without consumer consent was unfair, and violated the FTC Act;” essentially saying that porn pop-ups are illegal.

AdultFriendFinder agreed to a settlement with the FTC which sees the company admitting no guilt in return for not displaying sexually explicit ads to consumers unless they’re looking for that sort of content (or are already on an adult site) and to cease using pop-ups. AdultFriendFinder must also force affiliates to comply with the settlement or terminate them should they not comply. The last point is the interesting one because AdultFriendFinder has one of the bigger affiliate programs online, and would certainly have the largest affiliate program of any dating company; affiliate promotion is their bread and butter and if suddenly affiliates left the program or were restricted in ways that dramatically reduced clickthrus to AdultFriendFinder, the $1 billion sales price starts to look a little high; perhaps the later rumored price of $300 million at 3× EBITDA was such a low multiple because they saw this coming?

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<![CDATA[ Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about some new research showing how violent video games impacted the brains of children as monitored using fMRI equipment. The end result was basically that there was an effect – but it was basically what you'd expect. Violence made stimulated parts of the brain corresponding to being „emotional,“ which is what anyone would expect. Slashdot is now reporting on a similar study that really doesn't seem all that different (even if the press release about it claims that there hasn't been such evidence „until now“). Basically, the finding shows that when viewing violent media, the part of the brain that suppresses inappropriate aggression is less active. Again, though, that seems perfectly reasonable. If you're witnessing violence, it seems perfectly natural that your brain would prepare you to be ready for violence yourself if needed. What it doesn't show is that it actually does make you more violent. Unlike some research, this seems like perfectly good research and the researchers don't seem to be pretending it says more than it actually does. However, for those looking to support the idea that violent video games makes people violent, they won't find it here (unless they extrapolate out well beyond what the study covers).

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3i has invested €2.6 million in shopping search engine Twenga. Similar to other shopping search startups, Twenga is a meta search engine for products from online merchants. Twenga’s search results include user reviews and images on top of the usual price comparisons.

There are a ton of shopping product search engines out there right now. It’s a crowded space and to distinguish themselves companies have been focusing on advanced features such as deep product feature search (Retrevo) or price trend tracking (Mpire) to stand out. There’s The Find, Mpire, Crowdstorm, Bountii, Retrevo, SmartShopper, Pricefight, Ugenie, and many more. Google had it’s own notable stumble in online product search as well.

Of the engines, Twenga is most like “The Find”. Search results are returned as a wall of product images and can be refined by price and features. It also has several advanced features include price tracking and user reviews. This allows the engine to run more complex searches properties such as a 10% price drop. It also focuses on Europe and comes translated in an impressive six different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, and English). The network reached 7 million visitors in November 2007 and indexed over 40 million offers from 25,000 merchants

With so much choice, there’s no excuse to not get the lowest price on your Christmas gifts.

Twenga

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TheFind.com

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Crowdstorm

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Bountii

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Retrevo

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₀_1197121695“,„twen­ga“); ₁_1197121695“,„the­find.com“); ₂_1197121695“,„crow­dstorm“); ₃_1197121695“,„bou­ntii“); ₄_1197121695“,„re­trevo“);

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<![CDATA[ Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a Boing Boing post about some fairly ridiculous limitations on Western Digital's networked drives. Apparently, once you've set up the drive, you can subscribe to a service that will allow others to access your drive from the internet (rather than on the local network). You can set up accounts for specific people, including highlighting what is available to be shared with that person. However, Western Digital has simply decided that under no circumstance can you share a variety of multimedia filetypes, such as mp3s, wmvs, aac or others. Its reasoning is that this is „due to unverifiable media license authentication,“ which is basically a gibberish way of saying that you might be infringing on someone's copy­right. Of course, you might not be either. There are an awful lot of media files out there that are perfectly legitimate to share with others. Certainly, this sort of action makes this service useless to a musician who records tracks and makes them available to his record label using such a drive. The key question, though, is why Western Digital should bother at all. There's certainly no legal reason for Western Digital to do such a thing – and all it does is make their drives a lot less useful for perfectly legitimate activities.

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CNET Networks, the parent company for CNET.com, MP3.com, TV.com, GameSpot and several other web destinations, has released a set of widgets for embedding their videos on non-CNET websites.

The widgets are well-designed and currently available for BNET, CHOW, CNET.com, GameSpot, and TV.com. Whichever the source, they show some branding, a video clip, a selection of other video clips, and an advertisement. We’ve embedded one from GameSpot below (although they say it can take up to 15 minutes for the widget to start working).

In CNET’s words, these are meant to “offer publishers the opportunity to integrate quality editorial and programming from five CNET Networks brands into their site environments.” Will CNET share revenue from the advertising with participating sites, or pay them for spreading their brand? That doesn’t look like the case, especially since CNET insists that the widgets are meant to “enhance their users’ site experience, increase user engagement, and expand their ability to offer quality video.”

We’ve submitted an inquiry to CNET for more details, but I don’t think they’ve provided enough incentive for publishers to spread these. Perhaps they expect that only publishers with which they have formed customized partnerships will use them.

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Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.

The company burned through that money according to plan, meaning they ran out this month. The product roadmap was fulfilled, meaning development lags didn’t hurt the company. But the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met. And that meant no one else was going to put more money into the company.

For the last few months CEO Keith Teare has been working on a number of plans to keep the company going, but none of them panned out. So tonight the board decided, appropriately, to shut the company down. This will be orderly – employees will be let go but will be fully paid. In this job climate, all of them will hopefully find work very quickly.

I’m obviously sad about this since I was one of the founders, although my involvement for the last two years has been as a board member only. But this is the way the startup world works. You win some, but you lose most. Edgeio wasn’t meant to be a success. And now Keith and the rest of the team can start the fight over again, and hopefully next time they’ll come out winners.

On a side note, our job site, which is run by Edgeio, will be transitioning over in the next day or two.

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There’s been no shortage of stories lately alleging that Wikipedia moderators have fascist tendencies, but a new case goes one step further. A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party (Die Linke) told reporters that she had filed the charge on the grounds that Wikipedia’s German site contained too much Nazi symbolism with a particular fetish towards the Hitler Youth movement.

Schubert told Reuters (via SMH) that “The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education…This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

Schubert went on to claim that there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes. Use of Nazi symbols except for educational purposes is illegal in Germany.

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