crystal-studios.com

That means you can get started quickly–so far, after about an hour of scanning, the Lala Music Mover has recognized 500 of the songs in my collection and added them to my locker without forcing me to upload them manually. (The final tally after running it overnight: 1,971 songs recognized and added, 1,474 that I’d need to upload manually. That’s a ratio of just under 60% recognized.)

I wrote about the latest version of Lala when it started beta-testing back in May. At the time, I dismissed it as a weird hybrid between all-you-can-eat subscription services like Rhapsody and free streams from the likes of Imeem. I didn’t understand who’d pay 10 cents to stream a song an unlimited number of times when there are already plenty of free (mostly ad-supported) streaming sites out there.

So I was surprised to see reviews of that service Monday that used words like “spectacular” and “revolution.” As it turns out, Lala has made a couple of small but crucial changes that could turn it from also-ran into the first indispensable online music service since Pandora.

A great idea, well executed. Nicely done, Lala.

The changes affect Lala’s music locker service, which lets you store songs from your personal library “in the cloud” (that is, on Lala’s Web servers) and then access them from any computer later.

Back in May, the locker service worked only with MP3 files, which meant that anybody with a large collection of CDs ripped from iTunes (which uses AAC by default) or a Windows Media-based player was essentially out of luck. No more–the Music Mover application now recognizes both AAC (.m4a) and WMA files as well as MP3s.

Lala's online player looks a lot like iTunes, but why mess with the industry standard?

Second, the company has worked with the major labels to give users the right to access songs they already own without having to upload them. If Lala has the rights to a particular song, and it recognizes that you’ve got it in your library, it just lets you stream it for free. (Eight years ago, the labels sued the original MP3.com out of existence for doing exactly the same thing. How times have changed.)

Once you’re using the music locker, the other parts of the service begin to make much more sense. For example, if you’re already streaming all your music via the Lala player–which looks a lot like iTunes in a browser –then buying perpetual rights to stream one more song for only 10 cents becomes a very reasonable idea. That’s the whole dream of “cloud computing” in a nutshell–once Internet access becomes ubiquitous, the differences between online and offline blur until the distinction eventually becomes meaningless. There are also some interesting social networking and sharing features that could help users discover music on the site, such as a widget you can post on your Web page that lists four favorite songs.

Finally, Lala is reportedly planning an
iPhone application. That would mean iPhone access to your entire music library–goodbye capacity limits! I can’t wait to download it.

One annoying bug: I couldn’t resize the window for the Music Mover application, which meant I couldn’t read some of the error messages songs that Lala couldn’t upload. In particular, it rejected three songs because they were too large, but the error message was cut off before I could read the maximum size. Turns out, these songs were all over 50,000KB–huge epic songs, 25-plus minutes in length–so that seems like a pretty reasonable limit.

(Credit:
Lala)

Jessica Canning, VentureSource’s global research director, said in a statement:

In the first quarter, the median amount of time it took for portfolio companies to provide money back to their VCs was 4.7 years, compared with 6.8 years as was the case a year ago, according to VentureSource.

The most disturbing part about these new liquidity figures is that we’ve already reached the lows seen after the dot-com bust and we may not be at the bottom yet.

The median price paid for a venture-backed company was $22.1 million in the first quarter, compared with $60 million a year ago, according to VentureSource. That’s a steep 63 percent decline.

During the first quarter, $3.2 billion in liquidity was generated–a sharp contrast with $9.1 billion from a year ago and around the level seen in 2003. Because no initial public offerings took place in the first quarter, all of the $3.2 billion was generated from venture-backed companies selling themselves to the highest bidder.

With no venture-backed companies launching IPOs in the first quarter, all the activity fell to mergers and acquisitions. During the quarter, 68 mergers and acquisitions took place, substantially down from the 104 completed a year ago.

With venture-backed companies failing to launch IPOs and with mergers and acquisitions lagging, liquidity for venture capitalists fell 65 percent in the first quarter, according to a report released Wednesday by Dow Jones VentureSource.

“This is due to the fact that many public technology companies are focused on conserving capital and the few that are buying venture-backed companies are doing so for lower prices,” Canning said of the plunge.

While the amount of money companies raise through a sale or IPO is down, venture capitalists may find comfort in that the time it takes for their portfolio companies to provide liquidity is shrinking.

Those two types of transactions are how VCs and investors in VC funds make their money back, after nursing those companies along with funding. The fewer of those types of transactions, the less money that VCs and their investors make.

The IPO market is totally closed and there’s just no clear indication right now that it will revive any time in the next quarter or two, even with 43 companies currently in (IPO) registration. It’s a tough time to be a venture capitalist - and likely even tougher to be an investor in a venture fund.

Today, Seattle social-music company iLike
upped the ante with a update to iLike Local Concerts, a very attractive
iPhone app that was originally released in May. It downloads and caches a bunch of local concert information on first connection to reduce wait times in the future, and features a slick user interface with images for each listed artist. The updated version, which should be in the iTunes store shortly, will match iConcertCal’s ability to build a list of favorite artists based on your iTunes library, and will add notifications when one of your favorites announces a show in your town. Best of all, while iConcertCal costs $2.99, iLike Local Concerts is free.

Follow Matt on Twitter.

iLike Local Concerts has a wealth of information about local shows, plus crisp little images for each one.

Live music’s far from dead. You just have to know where to look.

But I was struck most by the optimism of Irving Azoff, who’s currently the CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment, but who’s better known as a long-time big shot in music management–he handled The Eagles, among many other acts. As he put it: “The performer on stage receiving the adulation of the fans–there’s nothing like it, and that’s never going away.”

That’s bad news for Ticketmaster, but good news for smaller venues. The only trouble with these smaller shows is that you might not hear about them unless you’ve got a good local weekly paper and are willing to scan the club listings regularly. That’s where a new crop of Web and mobile applications come into play. I’m still enjoying iConcertCal for iPhone, which I’ve only had for a week, but has already guided me to one amazing band (Garaj Mahal) I had no idea was in town until I opened the app.

He’s absolutely right, but I still think the days of paying more than a hundred bucks for the right to be herded into a stadium where they charge $8 for a beer and the ushers don’t allow dancing and the other “fans” yell if you stand up and the sound sucks and the performers can’t play their instruments and they look like tiny ants–that is, the big stadium concert experience–is becoming a relic like corded telephones and huge microwave ovens. It’s too expensive, it’s not fun enough, and there are far more opportunities for collective entertainment today than when I was a teenager back in the dark (pre-online) ages. Where are kids going to spend their allowance–on Xbox Live for $50 a year, or the latest enormo-tour for $50 (or more) an hour?

In its typical stately and slightly behind fashion, The New Yorker magazine this week published a piece (subscription required) about big changes in the live music industry. The article used as its grounding point a recent dispute between Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster over scalping and ticket withholding by artists, but the larger point was that the concert industry may be following the recording industry down the tubes–a prediction I made more than a year ago. The article has reams of supporting statistics and quotes, but the simple point is that the big acts aren’t selling as many tickets as they used to, and some industry insiders are worried that there are no young bands today who will be able to fill stadiums in 20 years.

Sprint to buy Virgin Mobile for $483 million The nearly half-billion-dollar acquisition bolsters Sprint’s prepaid offerings, which also include the Boost Mobile brand.

• Sprint Nextel bets big on prepaid wireless

• Sprint’s customer losses continue in 2nd quarter Apple blocks Google Voice app for iPhone The application never made it through the approval process, and all apps using Google Voice have been pulled from the App Store. At Black Hat and Defcon, hackers talk shop This week’s gatherings in Las Vegas are for those who know how to hack–and for those who want to stop them.

• Researchers attack my iPhone via SMS

• Hackers bypass parking meters

Report: Spam and malware at all-time highs Spam levels have jumped 80 percent since the first quarter, according to the latest report from McAfee.

• Report finds fake antivirus on the rise

The good news, points out reporter Stephen Shankland, is that both Microsoft and Yahoo can now get back to business. The Microhoo concept has been reduced from a giant cloud of uncertainty hanging over both companies to merely a complicated partnership between two rivals with Google as a common foe. The range of possibilities has been pruned back to a much more manageable scope.

PS3 and PSP slump, Wii hammered too Sony’s earnings shine light on a poor quarter for its gaming division. Nintendo’s
Wii also took a big hit, with unit sales cut in half compared with last year.

Also of note

• Report: eBay is building a Frankenskype

• Single misplaced ‘&’ caused latest IE exploit

• Twitter’s new home page: Information, not status updates

• McAfee acquiring MX Logic

• Facebook erroneously sucking in Twitter updates

Microsoft has spent much of its energy in the last couple years refining its core technology, improving in vertical categories, and rebranding its Web search under the Bing moniker. Yahoo, meanwhile has put a lot of energy into tools that allow others to build on its technology, including the BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey efforts.

(Credit:
Yahoo/Microsoft)

Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi, in an interview with Fried, said this company hasn’t looked at the specific lines of code in that area, but is open to trying to take Yahoo’s best ideas and integrate them into Bing.

Less expansive than the all-out $44 billion acquisition Microsoft proposed last year–and smaller than even some of the search partnerships once discussed–the deal does allow the companies to share resources and combine their engineering efforts, as noted in reporter Ina Fried’s breaking story. Even together, however, the two companies have only about 30 percent of the search market compared with Google, which has more than twice that amount.

Of course, while the deal mark the culmination of months of Microhoo maneuvering, it’s also just the beginning of a long road. Not only will the companies have to win regulatory approval for the deal, they’ll also have to figure out how to bring together disparate approaches to the search market.

After 18 months of fits and starts, press leaks, and behind-the-scenes drama, Microsoft and Yahoo this week signed a 10-year search deal that will see the two companies join forces to take on Google.

Congress: File sharing leaks sensitive data Sensitive files like Secret Service safehouse locations, military rosters, and IRS tax returns can still be found on file-sharing networks, according to new report.

• Dutch court tells Pirate Bay to scram, or else

Microsoft will open stores in Arizona, California Software maker confirms it has signed the first two leases as it follows Apple’s lead and opens its own set of retail stores.

Cheery CEOs: For Yahoo's Carol Bartz and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, happiness is a signed search deal.

That means content will be king, and Yahoo, as Krazit opines, will have to figure out whether it needs to expand its current offerings, pare down some of the less frequently used products, or tap an outsourcing strategy for this area too.

The news finally puts an end to one of the tech industry’s biggest will-they-or-won’t-they stories, noted reporter Tom Krazit. It also marks the end of an era for Yahoo as an independent search company, allowing it to further cut costs and rebrand itself as a digital media company.

On Road Trip, making a mobile, off-the-grid office
CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman set out to be able to get online deep in the Wyoming wilderness. How did he do?

• On Road Trip, comparing simple video camera options
• Full Road Trip coverage

Under the deal inked Wednesday morning, Microsoft’s technology will power Yahoo’s search results, while Yahoo will handle ad-selling duties for both companies’ search sites.

Sale of Google’s stake values AOL at $5.7 billion Time Warner purchased Google’s 5 percent stake in AOL for $283 million earlier this month, paving the way for an AOL spin-off and valuing the company well below 2000-era levels.

• AOL revenue slides 24 percent in 2nd quarter

More headlines

It likewise transforms Microsoft, which recently unleashed its new Bing search tool, into a clear No. 2 behind Google in search technology, with what should be a steady stream of Internet-derived revenue. (Click here for Krazit’s article on how the partnership was consummated and why it happened now–or here for a breakdown of the deal’s advantages and disadvantages.)

And, specifically Yahoo, Krazit notes, can go back to being first and foremost a media company, in the business of attracting as many people to its properties as possible in hopes of selling lucrative ad deals on those pages.

Ballmer: Windows will get more competition Microsoft’s chief addresses the state of the PC business and Windows’ place within it, in the wake of “a wild quarter.”

• Windows 7 activation cracked?

• Qi Lu: Search could be hugely profitable

• Mundie: The desktop of the future is a room

It’s expected to go into effect in 2010 and improve Yahoo’s profitability, though not its revenue, the companies said. Yahoo will get 88 percent of search revenue created by its sites during the first five years, while Microsoft will guarantee a certain level of search revenue for 18 months in each country.

At one point Windows Mobile 7 was expected early this year, but the product has fallen way behind schedule and is now expected some time next year.

Partly in anticipation of that, Microsoft is rebranding the movie and TV show store on its
Xbox 360 to use the same
Zune brand as it uses with its PC-based music and movie service. Over time, Microsoft wants Zune content to also show up on mobile phones.

On the Windows Mobile business, Bach acknowledged that Microsoft has seen its rivals move at a faster pace.

“I’m not planning on being any more specific today,” he said.

REDMOND, Wash.–Microsoft has long talked about a vision in which people can buy content like movies just once, and then watch them on a variety of devices. That vision will finally start to become a reality this fall, Microsoft’s entertainment unit president told CNET News on Thursday.

Bach, who demonstrated the company’s Project Natal motion-sensing technology for a crowd of financial analysts Thursday, said the technology will help the Xbox better appeal to casual gamers and people who don’t even think of themselves as gamers. It will also appeal to the hard-core gamer crowd, he said.

“All of the things about what you can buy and what you can buy where have less to do with technology and more to do with rights negotiations,” Bach said. “We’ll steadily make progress on that. It’s generally in the best interest of content providers and it’s certainly in the best interest of consumers.”

There are two pieces to delivering on that vision: one is the technology, and the other is getting the content owners to offer the needed licensing. In general, it is the latter that is the harder, Bach said.

Bach

One thing that will be available this fall is the Zune HD, Microsoft’s would-be rival to the
iPod Touch. Although I had gotten a brief peek at the product in May, I didn’t really get to check out the browser. I played with an updated build of the product on Thursday and was pleasantly surprised to see the browser has the kind of pinch zooming that one finds on the iPhone or in Windows 7. On the down side, I didn’t see anything to indicate it will have serious gaming abilities.

“I think you are going to see that steadily happen,” Bach said in an interview. “It’s not going to be a cut-over date…What it is more going to be is a steady pace. You already see us make some things available in multiple places. You will see more of that this fall. You will see more of that next year.”

As part of my chat with Bach, I did a video interview, which I have embedded below.

“My view on these topics is ‘talk is cheap’,” he said. “The next thing we are going to show people is Windows Mobile 6.5. There’s plenty of innovation in the pipeline.”

However, Bach continued to hold off on providing any details on when to expect the version of Windows Mobile beyond the interim version 6.5 update due out on devices later this year.

“If your point is we haven’t advanced Windows Mobile as fast as we like, I think the answer is that’s true,” Bach said. “You are going to see that change.”

He noted that Microsoft has shifted a lot of new talent into that part of the business. “We’ve made a lot of changes on the team in the last 12 months and that is starting to bear fruit.”

“Even the folks who are hard core Halo or Splinter Cell players, they are also going to want to play Natal games,” he said.

The company’s Entertainment and Devices unit president Robbie Bach said there won’t be one seminal moment when users magically get the ability to take purchased content everywhere. But, starting later this year, some of that notion will start to take hold.

“If your point is we haven’t advanced Windows Mobile as fast as we like, I think the answer is that’s true…You are going to see that change.” –Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices unit president

The company, which first announced that Natal effort at this year’s E3 gaming event, has said Natal will be available as an add-on to the Xbox 360 console. However, it hasn’t said when it will be available.

LivingSocial: Movies has a great recommendation engine.

MatchFlick quizzes you on your movie knowledge.

LivingSocial: Movies LivingSocial: Movies is my favorite movie app on Facebook. It’s useful, unique, and effective at tracking film interests.

My Movie Reviews needs more movies to review.

LivingSocial: Movies starts by requiring you to add movies to your listing, saying what you have watched, what you’re currently watching, or what you will soon watch. You can also rate each film out of five stars. From there, LivingSocial: Movies provides you with recommendations of films you might like based on the movies you rated highly. The app even lets you create a top 10 list to let all your Facebook friends know which movies you love. LivingSocial: Movies is a must-have.

If you’re a film buff, you might be happy to know that Facebook apps are available that will help you stay up-to-date on the industry, while giving you the option to tell all your friends what movies you love. Some of the apps are better than others, but one thing is certain: if you’re a real movie fan, you need to add at least some of them to your profile.

A long name, but it's worth checking out.

If you go to the Video Store buy something for me It might have a long name, but If you go to the Video Store buy something for me is a neat app that lets you share your movie interests with all your friends.

Movie Expert MovieExpert is a neat game that lets you watch clips from different movies to find their “goofs.”

My Movie Reviews My Movie Reviews is one of the least-useful apps in this roundup, but if you’re a frequent moviegoer, you might like it.

After you add the app to your profile, you’ll need to watch a full movie clip. When you find the problem with the scene, you can click on it on the area where the mistake is. You’ll start out with 3,000 MoviePoints. If you guess wrong, you’ll lose 100 points. When you accurately identify the problems, you’ll receive 100 MoviePoints back. It’s an addicting game, but it’s extremely difficult.

Flixster Movies provides a full social movie experience.

3. Blu-ray Collection: There’s no better way to track Blu-ray films.

Flixster Movies is like having the full Flixster experience in Facebook. You can review films, take quizzes to test your knowledge, connect with other app users, and research films you’re interested in. It’s a full-featured product that works quite well.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Overall, the quiz is quite difficult. Unless you’ve seen several movies and you can remember obscure scenes, you’ll probably have trouble answering questions. If the quiz isn’t for you, MatchFlick also provides information on the latest DVD releases, what’s playing in theaters, and reviews. It’s a full-featured app, but its design and menu system make it difficult to sift through all the extras it offers.

Flixster Movies Flixster Movies connects you with other movie fans to talk about your favorite films. The app also lets you update your Facebook status with the movies you want to see in theaters.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

My Movie Reviews is a bit of a misnomer. You can’t review any movie you like. Instead, the app limits your reviews to the films that are currently in theaters. When you see those movies, you can use the app to write a review, choose a star rating, and post that to your Facebook wall. Creating the review is simple, but not having the ability to write a review on any movie detracts from the experience. My Movie Reviews is a great premise, but limiting reviews to only those films in theaters is a major problem.

Movie Expert asks you to find the problems with each film scene.

Once you find what you’re looking for through the app’s search field, you can add it to your listing. Those movies can then be viewed by other app users. The app lists over 1,000 films. And since you can rate your listings, you can see how much you liked a movie, compared to your friends.

Blu-ray Collection keeps all your movies in one place.

2. Flixster Movies: It’s a close second. Flixster Movies is a fantastic app for film buffs.

1. LivingSocial: Movies: With so many great features, LivingSocial: Movies is simply the best app in this roundup.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

MatchFlick MatchFlick’s chief function is to provide you with a quiz that, so far, has over 7,000 questions. The more questions you answer correctly, the higher your global rank on Facebook.

My top 3

Blu-ray Collection Blu-ray Collection provides an extremely useful way to track and share your Blu-ray collection.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

After you add the app to your profile, you’re immediately presented with several films. You can choose the film you like and request them to rent it at the movie store. It might sound rather simplistic, but the app can be an effective movie-recommendation engine, since friends’ opinions matter so much. A larger listing of films would have been nice, but the app is still worth checking out.

Social film going

(Credit:
Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

At the heart of this open approach to technology adoption are open standards and open source. When I pressed Schick on the relative importance of both (”If you could only choose open standards or open source, which would it be?”), he responded:

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

(Credit: Jeffrey Gluck, IBM)

Most vendors must guess what customers want to buy, and how they’ll use it. For IBM, however, with about 400,000 employees, it has the potential to be its own best laboratory, one that becomes even more potent when mixed with active participation in open-source communities.

Jeff Schick, IBM

For example, we were blogging within IBM for a long time before deciding to build the Lotus Connections product, which is fast approaching hundreds of millions of users. After some study, we decided to build the blogging piece of Lotus Connections using the Apache Roller project, an open-source Java blog software. We have become active contributors to the project since then.

Our products may include open-source components, and often do, but ultimately open standards are the most important consideration for customers. As customers integrate our products into their various enterprise systems, open standards are critical for ensuring they work.

IBM seems to have figured out better than most how to marry the global open-source laboratory with a massive internal laboratory. Talking to Schick, there appears to be a very blurry line between “internal” development and “external” development, giving the company a significant advantage over proprietary (Microsoft) and open-source (Liferay, Open-Xchange) competitors alike.

Point taken, but it’s impressive just how much open source influences IBM’s product development. Gartner estimates that 80 percent of commercial applications will include open-source components by 2012. At IBM, the number may even be higher.

That potential, as I discovered in an interview on Friday with Jeff Schick, IBM’s vice president of social software, isn’t a “gimme,” but is powerful if you can enable the right sort of corporate culture and processes.

But it’s not just in Lotus Connections. As you look across nearly every capability across our social-software strategy, open source plays a critical role. Open source is an integral part of how we build products. Our engineers are very much in tune with the wide variety of open-source components that are available to them, and use and contribute to them. Regularly.

commentary

Despite IBM not releasing its core software products under open-source licenses, Schick noted just how integral open source is to IBM:

From a development perspective, as we build our social software products in Lotus, we’re always looking at ways to improve quality and time-to-market. Open source often helps us with both areas.

Some competitors may be able to match IBM’s scale, but few to none have managed to marry internal scale (employees) with the power of external scale (open-source communities) in the way that IBM has.

For example, Schick mentioned that IBM has a technology adoption program for employees that spans the gamut of new products, add-ons and patches to existing products, and still-raw technologies direct from IBM’s labs. While the invitation list and process is different for each particular item, IBM generally encourages its product groups to “experiment” upon each other. The earlier in the development process, the better.

While wired broadband is critical, the FCC also noted in its report that wireless broadband access is also becoming increasingly important. By 2011, smartphones, which are more like mini-computers than phones, will overtake sales of traditional cell phones. Smartphone users generally use a lot more wireless data services, which means that carriers will have to keep beefing up their networks to provide more capacity.

The FCC has been given the responsibility of coming up with a national broadband policy to ensure every American has access to broadband. And on Tuesday a task force at the FCC led by Blair Levin, former chief of staff to onetime FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, issued its initial report on forming this plan. The final report is due to Congress in February.

There are a lot of factors that make building universal broadband expensive. It’s much more expensive to build infrastructure in rural areas. Not only are capital expenditures more expensive in rural areas, but the operating expenses are higher, driven by transport and transit. Universal Service Fund recipients have made progress bringing broadband to rural America, but the fund faces systemic and structural problems.

The FCC task force has been hosting workshops and hearings. And it will continue to do so over the next few months. But what it has concluded at this early stage is that bringing true broadband to all Americans is going to cost a lot.

While it would only take about $20 billion to blanket the country with broadband service with speeds between 768Kbps to 3Mbps service, the FCC has questioned whether those speeds will be enough. Instead, it is recommending more aggressive network build-outs that would increase the speed of these networks to about 100Mbps or faster. This will likely push the price tag of the entire network expansion to more than $350 billion. And if all consumers are given a choice of broadband provider, these cost estimates would be even higher.

“Most of that ecosystem is funded by the private sector,” Levin said. “We expect that to continue. Where can the government play a role in ensuring and improving the role of that ecosystem?”

While some of the biggest carriers, such as Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel are already building the next generation of wireless networks, which increase speeds and network capacity, the FCC noted that there is still a need to make more wireless spectrum available.

If the FCC establishes regulation and policy to encourage these faster speed connections, the agency will have to figure out how to measure the quality of these connections. Today no such quality assurance is in place. And the FCC said in its report that actual broadband speeds lag advertised speeds by at least 50 percent, which means people are often paying for speeds that they do not get.

Bringing universal broadband to all Americans is not going to be cheap.

Another issue that must be dealt with is how the FCC will encourage more competition to give consumers choice, especially when it comes to these higher-speed services. At least half of Americans today only have access to one provider that can offer Internet speeds for video streaming and two-way video conferencing.

So who is going to pay for this expensive infrastructure? The government will pay for some of it. Congress has already allocated $7 billion as part of the economic stimulus package. And more tax payer money is likely to be used in the future. Exactly, how much is uncertain.

The Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday it could cost more than $350 billion to wire the United States with high-speed Internet access.

The
CTIA, the trade association for the wireless industry, sent a letter to the FCC this week saying the government needs to identify more airwaves that can be used for commercial use.

The FCC believes these faster networks are necessary because broadband users are expected to use more bandwidth-intensive applications in the future than they use today. For example, the average consumer today uses the Internet for Web browsing, e-mail and instant messaging, and entertainment, but in the future uses will include streaming video, video teleconferencing, and electronic medical monitoring. These services and applications will require significantly more bandwidth.

But the bulk of the money used to build these networks will likely come from private industry, Levin said at the meeting held Tuesday in Washington, The Wall Street Journal reported (subscription required).

See also Palm’s Trendtracker, which lets you see trending topics not only geography but by time of day as well. We checked it out last week.

Trendsmap gives you a birds-eye view of trending topics on Twitter, per city, region, or worldwide.

One thing the service doesn’t do very well though, is serve smaller towns. This wasn’t a big deal killer for me since I’m based in San Francisco, but if you want to use it for somewhere that’s outside a major city, you’re out of luck. This may simply be a limitation of how deep the data set is, but it keeps you from seeing trends starting up in smaller towns, which can be more interesting than in major cities.

All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each city. Clicking on any of them pops up a small info box that aggregates the latest tweets, local and global seven-day histories of that trend’s popularity, as well as some top-related news links that change depending on what’s trending.

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn’t been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter’s API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.

(Credit:
CNET)

Where the site shines though, is in letting you dig even deeper by giving each city its own trends page. Here you can cruise through info boxes without first having to find each tag, as well as see all of the trending charts stacked up against one another–something I think makes for a better experience. It also collects all of the related media like photos and videos in one single section (try giving it a spin for Las Vegas).

DriverSide isn't quite the WebMD of car sites, but its diagnostic tool does give you a sense of what's likely wrong with your car.

DriverSide's mechanics answer user questions.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The biggest challenge for DriverSide is that it’s just not very sexy, nor is it a site that most users will visit frequently. People who have used the site in the past (I’m one), and who could take advantage of it when they have an issue with their car may simply forget it’s there when it could be of the most help to them.

A year ago, I covered DriverSide, then in beta, a site designed to help people own cars–not buy new ones or fetishize the ones they can’t afford. Since then, with the crisis in the U.S. economy, the automobile market has changed dramatically, making the boring utility of DriverSide likely even more attractive than it was when it launched.

The site is coming out of beta now and it has a few new features designed for people who don’t feel their cars are disposable items. “Car awareness is different today,” founder Trevor Traina says. He quotes a statistic: 82 percent of people now intend to keep their cars longer than they did before the recession hit. So DriverSide’s mission–”teaching people to maintain and own cars”–seems to be right for the time.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

DriverSide makes money from referrals and leads (to repair shops and auto parts stores) as well as from advertising. The site will also contract with repair chains to give them co-branded versions of the site. This could be a good way for dealers and shops to stay engaged with their customers, and that’s important for the auto dealers. As new car sales slow, it’s going to be their repair arms that keep them in business.

As the site leaves beta, it’s getting a few new features. There’s a diagnostic utility: you answer a series of questions and it will give you a diagnosis as well as a list of repair shops nearby, with reviews from DriverSide users (integration with Yelp’s reviews may come in the future). As before, you can get a price estimate on DriverSide if you know exactly what work you need.

Some clever features, like the service’s new specific Twitter feeds for ownership news related to the top 50 cars its users own, could help users to remember the site when they need it. And if Traina can keep DriverSide front of mind when it’s needed, it could capture enough of what Traina says is the $34 billion annual “ownership” market for the car industry–for service, parts, insurance, and so on. It’s a good model for the times.

Sadly, the feature I want–the ability to just hold an iPhone up to a car making a strange noise to get a diagnosis–has yet to be developed. However, I did recommend that Traina call the team over audio recognition company Melodis, so maybe we’ll get that eventually.

DriverSide also now employs its own panel of mechanics to answer questions from users. I found this feature more useful than the rather broad diagnostic utility, since in the questions I read, the mechanics seemed not only to know cars but know what particular repairs should cost. It’s nice to take a car into a shop with that information.