In This Update:
• Mexico’s Slim to invest $250 mln in New York Times
• Web Sites Scale Up for Inauguration Traffic
• YouTube Begins Experimenting with Downloadable Videos
• Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market
• The Next Android Smartphone
• FCC Asks if Comcast Slows Rivals’ VoIP Traffic
• Google: Customize Your Search Results with ‘Preferred Sites’
• With an Ultrathin Film, a Big Step Forward for Flexible Electronics
• Geni, Yammer Both Raise Funding
• Fliqz Raises another $6 Million For Turnkey Video Platform Solutions

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Mexico’s Slim to invest $250 mln in New York Times
REUTERS
The New York Times Co. said it will get a $250 million investment from one of the world’s richest men, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a move that will give the company much-needed time to clear financial hurdles. Slim, 68, who already owns 6.9 percent of the Times’s stock, will receive warrants in the company that could give him an eventual 17 percent interest in the publisher. That would make him one of the largest shareholders in the venerable newspaper publisher, following the Ochs-Sulzberger family that has controlled the company for more than 100 years. It is unclear what Slim’s eventual aim is with the company.
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Web Sites Scale Up for Inauguration Traffic2
DATA CENTER KNOWLEDGE
Kakul Srivastava, general manager of Flickr, said that he expects a healthy jump from its daily average of 3 million photos and videos uploaded to the service. Slide, the largest maker of widgets for social networks, said it expects a 60 percent spike in the use of its SuperPoke application. It’s also likely to be a huge day for Facebook, which has become the web’s largest photo sharing site, hosting with more than 10 billion photos. Twitter is doubling its capacity to manage an expected surge in activity. But co-founder Biz Stone said he is not expecting the same kind of traffic spikes as on Election Night, when the site was flooded with 10 times the normal traffic. “We’re always working to increase reliability but yes, the inauguration puts a finer point on it,” Stone told ZDNet. “During massively shared events we normally see an increase in timeline views and tweets per second. Last week we significantly boosted performance with both hardware and software optimization.”
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YouTube Begins Experimenting with Downloadable Videos
ARS TECHNICA
YouTube videos may soon become more accessible, thanks to a new feature Google began experimenting with late last week. Launching in what appears to be a limited rollout, some YouTube videos can now be downloaded via a simple link at YouTube’s site, opening the doors for more sharing of videos posted to the massive community. The first videos to receive the new feature appear to be from President-elect Barack Obama’s ChangeDotGov Channel. A small “Click to download” link appears beneath a video’s toolbar on the YouTube site, and videos download in the same high-quality MPEG4, H.264 format that can be seen by viewing YouTube through portals on the iPhone and Apple TV. These links don’t appear on a user’s channel page, however; you have to visit a video directly, such as Obama’s latest Weekly Address on January 17, 2009.
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Cisco Plans Big Push Into Server Market
NEW YORK TIMES
Within the next few months, Cisco Systems, the largest maker of networking equipment, plans to release a product that threatens to shake up the technology industry and put the company on a collision course with traditional partners like Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M. The product – a server computer equipped with sophisticated virtualization software – is a bold but risky move by Cisco into an unfamiliar, intensely competitive market that typically produces far lower profits than Cisco makes from network gear. But it reflects the company’s ambition to grow beyond its roots as the so-called plumber of the Internet to offer everything from instant messaging software to digital stereos.
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The Next Android Smartphone5
READ WRITE WEB
Here in the U.S., your choices in phones running Google’s new Android operating system have been limited. If you weren’t a fan of the T-Mobile G1 form factor – a design best for heavy texters thanks to its slide-out keyboard – you were pretty much out of luck. No more. Word has it that Samsung will soon be releasing their own Android smartphone for use on both the T-Mobile and Sprint carriers. According to TechRadar, a company representative for Samsung confirmed that they will be speeding up the development of their own version of an Android-powered device in order to stay competitive in the mobile phone market. The phone will debut sometime in 2009 and will be available for T-Mobile and Sprint customers.
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FCC Asks if Comcast Slows Rivals’ VoIP Traffic
GIGAOM
Looks like Comcast’s new network management plan is drawing the ire of competing Voice over IP providers and the scrutiny of federal regulators. The plan, which is detailed here, basically slows bandwidth hogs broadband speeds during times of congestion at a particular node. Apparently, it also has the unfortunate side effect of lowering voice quality for VoIP services – including those offered by Comcast’s competitors. More interestingly, Comcast advertises that its own digital calling service (a variation on VoIP) is unaffected by such network slowdowns, and the FCC wants to know why.
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Google: Customize Your Search Results with ‘Preferred Sites‘
READ WRITE WEB
Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System has found a new experimental feature for Google Search: preferred sites. Thanks to this, you may soon be able to tell Google about your favorite sites and have them appear more often in your search results. If you like to get your movie data from the IMDB, for example, you can tell Google to prefer this site over other movie review services. This feature would also be very useful if you want Google to prefer results from your local newspaper over stories from national papers, or if you want to see product reviews from specific sites.As it is typical for these experiments from Google, this new feature is only slowly being rolled out and it is not clear if this will become part of Google’s standard feature set for Google Search yet. If you want to see if it is available for your account, click on the ‘Preferences’ link next to the search box on Google Search.
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With an Ultrathin Film, a Big Step Forward for Flexible Electronics
NEW YORK TIMES
Flexible electronics – the kind that might be used in “smart” clothing, say, or in foldable displays that could make reading news online more like reading it in print – are still far from an everyday reality. But scientists in South Korea are reporting a significant advance toward the development of such devices. In a paper in Nature, Jae-Young Choi of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and Keun Soo Kim and Byung Hee Hong of Sungkyunkwan University and colleagues describe a technique for making stretchable thin electrodes out of graphene.
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Geni, Yammer Both Raise Funding
SOCAL TECH
West Hollywood-based Geni, and instant messaging spinout Yammer have both raised $5M in funding from the firms’ existing backers, Charles River Ventures and the Founders Fund, according to regulatory filings and reports. Geni is a high profile, family social networking and genealogy site headed by former Paypal co-founder David Sacks, and Yammer is the Twitter-like instant messaging spinout of Geni, focused on businesses. The details of the Geni funding were first reported by PEHub; with details on Yammer’s latest round reported on TechCrunch this morning. Requests for comment to the firm’s management were not returned Monday. Geni and Yammer have both been fundraising since the middle of last year.
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Fliqz Raises another $6 Million For Turnkey Video Platform Solutions
TECHCRUNCH
White label video host Fliqz is adding more funding to its war chest in a Series C round led by Triangle Peak Partners and joined by Mohr Davidow Ventures, which had already invested $5.5 million into the company in a previous round. The third round brings the total financing for the company to $12.2 million . While the name is virtually impossible to remember, Fliqz has a solid offering with plug-and-play video solutions for small businesses looking to host company videos on a branded video player, with an application set that includes capturing, uploading, hosting and monetizing videos. The startup offers a basic package for free with an ad-supported video player service but also delivers solutions from $99 to $999 per month (with a $7500 development fee for the latter package).
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