In This Update:
• Verizon Picks LTE For 4G Wireless Broadband
• DVB-H to Be EU Mobile TV Standard
• American Greetings Acquiring PhotoWorks For $26.5 Million
• Facebook May Revamp ‘Beacon’
• Adobe Taps Yahoo to Serve Ads in PDF Files
• Yahoo, AOL May Abandon Web Radio After Royalties Rise
• E*Trade to Get Cash Infusion from Citadel
• Gannett Preps Online Video Network To Streamline Content
• Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results
• Study: P2P Traffic Is Booming, BitTorrent the Dominant Protocol
• Report: World Faces “Cyber Cold War” Threat
• Google Service Uses Cell Towers to Locate Users
• New Software Detects ISP Web Interference
• MTV to Offer All “South Park” Clips Online

Verizon Picks LTE For 4G Wireless Broadband
GIGAOM
Verizon Wireless, a division of Verizon is picking LTE – Long Term Evolution – as the 4G technology for wireless broadband, and will start trials sometime in 2008. LTE allows download rates of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 50 Mbps for every 20 MHz of spectrum. It can handle 200 connections per 5 MHz. However, it is said to be spectrally more efficient and can handle IP connections better. LTE networks are based on the Internet Protocols. The traditional wireless vendors – Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Nortel (NT), Motorola (MOT), Nokia-Siemens, and Ericsson (ERICY) – are going to be hardware suppliers, while the usual handset makers will make devices for this trial. Vodafone, joint owner of Verizon Wireless is also planning a LTE Trial for 2008.
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DVB-H to Be EU Mobile TV Standard
REUTERS
The European Commission said on Thursday that it would set DVB-H as a single European Union standard for mobile television broadcasting by the end of February, but several EU states said they would try to oppose the move. DVB-H, promoted by companies such as Nokia is so far the only standard with a global presence, while South Korea, Japan, the United States and China are embracing local rivals, such as one set by Qualcomm. “DVB-H will be published by the Commission in the list of official EU standards,” the EU’s executive said in a statement.
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American Greetings Acquiring PhotoWorks For $26.5 Million
PAIDCONTENT
A month after acquiring Webshots from CNET, American Greeting is making a second buy in the online photo space: OTCBB-traded PhotoWorks for $26.5 million. The $0.595 per share offer represents a significant premium to today’s $0.26 close. PhotoWorks is a photo sharing site with an emphasis on selling users physical items (calendars, greeting cards, etc.) they create with their digital images, so it should be a nice bridge between Webshots and American Greetings’ core business. The deal is expected to close in January 2008.
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Facebook May Revamp ‘Beacon’
BUSINESS WEEK
In the wake of mounting criticism, Facebook executives are discussing changes to a controversial advertising tool that publicizes users’ Web activities outside of the popular social network. Alterations to the recently introduced Beacon system could be announced as early as Nov. 29. Executives of the three-year-old company were in deep talks over proposed changes late into the afternoon on Nov. 28, according to a person familiar with the matter. At issue is the Beacon program, which alerts members’ Facebook “friends” to purchases and other activities on third-party Web sites. A spokesperson for the company declined to discuss changes, reiterating an earlier statement: “Facebook is listening to feedback from its users and committed to evolving Beacon.”
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Adobe Taps Yahoo to Serve Ads in PDF Files
ONLINE MEDIA DAILY
Adobe has tapped Yahoo to launch a new contextual ad service for PDF files, giving publishers the option of monetizing their white papers, case studies and other documents with dynamic ads. Called “Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo,” publishers can participate in the beta program for free starting Thursday, while advertisers will be able to buy PDF inventory as part of routine Yahoo Publisher Network buys. The text ads are dynamically targeted to each page of PDF content, and appear in a skyscraper-sized panel that runs on the right side of the document so as not to disrupt the viewing experience. Publishers register for the service, upload their PDF content and then Adobe enables it for ad-insertion.
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Yahoo, AOL May Abandon Web Radio After Royalties Rise
BLOOMBERG
Yahoo! Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit may shut down their Web radio services after being hit with a 38 percent increase in royalties to air music. “We’re not going to stay in the business if cost is more than we make long term,” Ian Rogers, general manager at Yahoo’s music unit, said in an interview. Yahoo and AOL stopped directing users to their radio sites after SoundExchange, the Washington-based group representing artists and record labels, began collecting the higher fees in July. Those royalties may stifle the growth of Internet radio, which increased listeners 39 percent in the past year, according to researcher ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia.
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E*Trade to Get Cash Infusion from Citadel
WALL STREET JOURNAL
E*Trade Financial Corp., which is ensnared in the mortgage crisis, said it is getting a $2.55 billion cash infusion from Citadel Investment Group, in a bid to restore confidence and liquidity in the discount brokerage. In a plan overseen by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, Citadel will make a two-part investment in E*Trade, which is based in New York. The first component is the purchase of E*Trade’s entire $3 billion portfolio of asset-backed securities for a value of around $800 million. The second component is the purchase of $1.75 billion worth of 10-year notes, paying an annual interest rate of about 12.5 percent
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Gannett Preps Online Video Network To Streamline Content
PAIDCONTENT
While online video has had a place on most of the 150 websites behind Gannett’s over the past few years, the company has found it difficult to seamlessly organize, distribute and, most important, make money from it. The McLean, Va.-based media company thinks it has a solution: form an online video network that will allow it to manage content from its various U.S. properties-85 newspapers, including USA Today, and 23 TV stations-more easily. The increased scale from a single video pipeline is also intended to make Gannett’s videos more attractive to advertisers and lead to wider distribution via syndication deals. The company is working with internet TV provider Maven Networks for front end player/advertising and Comcast subsidiary thePlatform for backend management/syndication.
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Google Experimenting With Digg Style Voting On Search Results
GOOGLIFIED
Google Experimental is currently running an experiment that allows some selected users to “influence [the] search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results.” On a result page, you can choose move a search result to the top by clicking on the up-arrow corresponding result, which will be marked by an orange asterisk next time you search for the same keywords. Similarly, if you don’t like the page, you can hide it in future searches for the same keywords by clicking on the X button next to the title of the result.
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Study: P2P Traffic Is Booming, BitTorrent the Dominant Protocol
TORRENTFREAK
A recent study on the usage of filesharing applications in several countries shows that between 49 and 83 percent of all Internet traffic is P2P related, with peaks of over 95 percent during the night. Interestingly, the study also shows that about 20 percent of all BitTorrent traffic is encrypted. Ipoque, a German based company that specializes in developing bandwidth managing solutions for Universities and ISPs concludes this from data they gathered between August and September 2007. In total, over 3 Petabytes (3 million Gigabytes) of traffic was analyzed, coming from an estimated 1 Million users.
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Report: World Faces “Cyber Cold War” Threat
REUTERS
A “cyber cold war” waged over the world’s computers threatens to become one of the biggest threats to security in the next decade, according to a report published on Thursday. About 120 countries are developing ways to use the Internet as a weapon to target financial markets, government computer systems and utilities, Internet security company McAfee said in an annual report. Intelligence agencies already routinely test other states’ networks looking for weaknesses and their techniques are growing more sophisticated every year, it said.
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Google Service Uses Cell Towers to Locate Users
INFOWORLD
Google launched a location service for mobile users on Wednesday that doesn’t rely on GPS. Google Maps with My Location, currently in beta, locates users who don’t have GPS-enabled phones based on their location to nearby cell towers. The result isn’t as accurate as GPS but works for people who lack the positioning technology in their phones. “It helps users speed up search by showing the general neighborhood they’re in,” said Steve Lee, product manager at Google for the service. Without the location service, users must type in their address or neighborhood in order to find nearby businesses using Google Maps.
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New Software Detects ISP Web Interference
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Increasingly worried over Internet providers’ behavior, a nonprofit has released software that helps determine whether online glitches are innocent hiccups or evidence of deliberate traffic tampering. The San Francisco-based digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation hopes the program, released Wednesday, will help uncover “data discrimination” – efforts by Internet providers to disrupt some uses of their services – in addition to the cases reported separately by EFF, The Associated Press and other sources. The new software compares lists of data packets sent and received by two different computers and looks for discrepancies between what one sent and the other actually received. Previously, the process had to be done manually.
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MTV to Offer All “South Park” Clips Online
REUTERS
MTV Networks plans to make every clip from every episode of the hit animated comedy “South Park” available for free online next year as part of a strategy to reach consumers everywhere. The decision from the biggest division of media conglomerate Viacom Inc follows on the heels of the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” whose popularity online has helped boost television viewership. MTV Networks’ Comedy Central channel network began offering in October some 13,000 “Daily Show” videos dating back to 1999. Presenting versions of TV shows online has not hurt television ratings, and may have actually helped, according to network executives.
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Tags: Adobe, Alcatel-Lucent, American Greetings, AOL, BitTorrent, Cisco, DVB-H, EMI, ETrade, European Commission, Facebook, Gannett, Google, HBO, IAC, Intel, IPO, ISP, Local, LTE, MTV, MTX, Music, Nokia, Orange, P2P, RIM, Siemens, Time Warner, Verizon, Video, Yahoo