Twitter is nearing an agreement with Viacom to host TV clips and sell advertising on the site, reports Bloomberg. It is also reportedly discussing a content partnership with Comcast’s NBCUniversal, and one or more of the deals could be reached by mid-May.

According to sources cited in the article, the partnerships would let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks. Twitter already has agreements in place with ESPN, Weather Channel LLC, and Turner Broadcasting System.

If the partnerships come to fruition, it would be the latest step in Twitter’s moves to branch out from being a microblogging platform to a multi-faceted media platform in a bid to increase user engagement and reap more advertising revenue. Engaging with television networks is a logical step for the company: a third of active Twitter users tweeted last June about something they saw on television, up from 26 percent last year, according to a Nielsen report (Twitter has also partnered with Nielsen to measure how much of chatter on the site is prompted by television programs).

Other recent moves by Twitter to build tools allowing users to share content within the platform instead of relying on third-party providers include the launch of its music app last week after it acquired music discovery service startup We Are Hunted, and the introduction of Vine.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You may not have noticed yet but Twitter added line breaks yesterday. This change clearly hasn’t fully sunk in yet — at least, not to my Twitter stream (which is two-line business as usual this morning). But expect a few inflated tweets to start floating through your feed soon.

Adding the ability to view line breaks is a pretty subtle change on the surface — yet a few hard returns can spread 140 characters an awful long way:

Twitter won’t let you tweet giant blocks of emptiness (I checked). But you should be able to space your tweet text over around 70 lines if you ration it one character per time (and want to be really irritating):

One of the huge advantages (in my view) of Twitter is the brevity of tweets, and the resulting density of Twitter streams. Twitter is now allowing the latter to break up. Which is a pretty big deal, in one sense. But hopefully won’t be as disruptive to Twitter users as it could be — ie if everyone you follow suddenly turned into a five-year-old child.

Why is Twitter adding line breaks? Officially the company hasn’t said much — beyond suggesting it will be “fun”:

It’s possible Twitter is responding to advertisers hoping for more ways to make their promoted tweets stand out — ie by occupying more of your stream. But since anyone can pepper their tweets with extra padding it may not always be such a big differentiator.

Line breaks are supported by the Twitter web client and Twitter’s official apps. But third party clients are likely to need time to catch up. (You can imagine some will tout lack of support as a feature.)

Searching for #linebreaks on Twitter brings up a mix of views on the new feature (with some obvious grumbles). And a few innovative uses — such as linebreak chess:

The most immediate beneficiary of Twitter’s spaced out largess are micropoets (and tweeters of haiku, senryu and gogyohka):

I can see two main Twitters emerging post-line breaks (assuming Twitter doesn’t get cold feet and spike the feature). One version where users interested in using Twitter as an information service carry on tweeting their standard two-lines’ worth of wisdom while gleaning lots of useful knowledge from what is a quasi-RSS feed reader.

And another Twitter, where the kids hang out, swapping song lyrics and tweeting emoji-style graphics at each other — spread out over as many lines as possible like so much digital graffiti.

In other words:

Now, I don’t pretend to know very much about the relationship between big pharmaceutical companies and healthcare professionals, except that I do know it’s complicated. A huge amount of money is spent on R&D in the Life Sciences, and in turn, more money is spent marketing the resulting drugs and treatments. And in any industry, market intelligence is crucial, as is getting your message across to decision makers. In this case, on the ground at least, that means doctors and other healthcare professionals.

But until recently, the feedback loop between marketing message and recipient has tended to lag a little. InCrowd aims to change that through its on-demand platform which enables pharmaceuticals to survey screened and targeted healthcare professionals in real-time. Today, the company has announced that it’s closed a $2.2 million Series A round led by Nauta Capital.

Powering InCrowd is its database of pre-screened healthcare professionals — the ‘Crowd’ — who have opted-in to the platform. Pharmaceutical and other Life Science companies can then create specialist micro-surveys that target specific segments of the ‘Crowd’ and conduct these in real-time, delivered via its mobile app. So, for example, a Big Pharmaceutical could choose to reach doctors who have practiced for more than 10 years and specialise in breast cancer.

In the past year, InCrowd says that it has expanded its client base to include 8 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and has a growing list of biotech and medical device companies also using its service. That take-up, says the company, is down to the ability to offer near instant market feedback in an industry that is already very data driven. That data has now gotten a lot more real-time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.

“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).”

“Most unsuccessfully funded projects come up short because of a lack of interest in the project or because their creators didn’t promote it enough, not because of the Kickstarter page itself. Success on Kickstarter comes down to making a video, pricing things reasonably, and telling people about the project.”

In fact, project creators asked that Kickstarter projects be de-indexed for a reason: they ranked high in search results and, if Google crawled them, the resulting failures would percolate towards the top. “Because Kickstarter projects index very highly in search, creators were seeing their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — for their name. That obviously sucked, so we made the decision to de-index them.”

The company has added a FAQ to address the problem here.

As we said before, this isn’t a marketplace, it’s a dog show. You don’t want the ugly mutts hanging around when there are plenty of great specimens to peruse. This is crowdsourcing perfected, in a way, and if there’s one thing we know about crowds it’s that they’re easily swayed, fickle, and rarely kind.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new title format where the topic replaces the date of the show release (it’s in the URL). Today’s topic: what it always is, Apple’s relentless march toward encircling Windows in a sea of HD-quality iOS devices. In the latest update to OS X, push notification, the Twitter social bus, and AirPlay come to the TV by way of the full complement of iOSish devices, now including the Mac.

With iPad 3 just weeks away, Apple has made it retinal clear that the company has no intention of allowing anybody to catch up to the economic juggernaut where premium products sell out at prices that can’t be undercut. The realtime global social network fuels demand for the iOS pervasive screen architecture (and coopetive partners such as Android and Amazon) to such a viral extent that the resulting momentum keeps competitors from realizing Apple’s supply chain economies of scale.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

RIM has just released their Q3 earnings, and the figures are about as rough as we expected: the Waterloo-based company pulled in $5.2 billion during the past quarter — a considerable bump over their Q2 performance, but still a 6% drop year-over-year.

Nearly 80% of the company’s revenue came from hardware sales, with RIM shipping 14.1 million BlackBerry handsets during the quarter. As expected, performance of the company’s beleaguered PlayBook wasn’t up to snuff yet again. The company only shipped around 150,000 of their ailing PlayBook tablets this quarter, down from nearly 200,000 shipped in Q2. To be honest, it’s a bit of surprise that they sold that many, although the company has been getting aggressive with PlayBook price cuts and promotions.

Ever the optimists, RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis kept up a hopeful tone while they commented on the company’s financials.

“Despite the challenges faced in the third quarter, the BlackBerry subscriber base grew to almost 75 million customers around the world,” they said in a recent release. “RIM continues to have strong technology, unique service capabilities and a large installed base of customers, and we are more determined than ever to capitalize on our strengths to overcome the recent execution challenges surrounding product launches and the resulting financial performance.”

While I have to give them props for essentially acknowledging that the PlayBook was/is a flop, it’s not the only problem that RIM has had to face in recent months. There was of course the multi-day outage that struck users across the globe, not to mention the naming snafu they encountered when trying to brand their new OS.

RIM expects this next quarter to be even grimmer: they forecast revenues of between $4.6 and $4.9 billion, and they expect to ship between 11 and 12 million BlackBerrys. The company’s earnings conference call is about to kick off, and we’ll be sure you keep you updated with any new details.

UPDATE: RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis will only draw a yearly salary of $1, effective immediately.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Microsoft has announced the .NET Gadgeteer, a small, Arduiono-like toolkit that allows hackers to build unique hardware and software solutions using a set of pre-assembled parts.

The kid includes a framework for hardware programming that works with Microsoft’s own Visual Studio. For example, you can add camera widgets, heat sensors, and screens to your software project, program it from a PC, and then use the resulting device in research and experimentation applications.

The platform is ostensibly open and any hardware manufacturer can design hardware for the framework. For example, you can buy a starter kit from GHI Electronics for $249.95 at the end of September. It includes a camera module, a USB host, a little screen, and a few other devices including an SD Card reader.

You can get started by download the software here.

With Arduino controlling the mind-share in rapid electronics prototyping, it makes sense for Microsoft to get into this space. I’d say the main concern for most folks looking for a device framework is compatibility with existing systems and Windows and Visual Studio makes sense for most commercial entities.

via SlashGear

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Researchers at Stanford University have put together an interesting new battery technology that combines two theoretically coveted attributes: transparency and flexibility. The method of making the battery transparent is rather clever, and while the resulting product is far less energy-dense than its opaque relatives, it’s still an interesting development.

The secret is organizing the components in a certain way on a microscopic scale. The electrode material isn’t see-through, but there’s no reason it has to be a solid block instead of something less substantial. Materials Science professor Yi Cui made the electrode layer of this battery a grid of threads which, at only 35nm thick, are invisible to the naked eye. By arranging them in a sparse grid, he produces an array with tolerable energy density but which light can easily pass through.

The grid is embedded in a non-conductive, flexible substrate, and then a gel electrolyte layer interposed between it and another grid, placed precisely above the first. By stacking the electrode grids in this way and using only clear materials for the other components, they’ve been able to achieve around 60% transparency. The wattage is nothing to crow about, but that’s next on the list to improve.

Applications? I’m no engineer, but I’m sure there are plenty of places where a flexible and/or transparent battery could be useful. Wrapping it around other components, embedding it in already-transparent items (screens, windows, etc), and other ideas are quick to come to mind, but who knows what the research will enable? Cui and his team of students are working hard on scaling the technology and working out the bugs.

The full paper can be read here at PNAS.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in September, Google formally launched goo.gl, the official URL shortener from the tech giant. The service first went into operation late in 2009 and was tied to Google’s own products, like Google Toolbar, but now it’s a direct competitor to the myriad consumer-focused shorteners, the most famous of which is bit.ly. Today, goo.gl has announced a handful of new features that should make fans of the service happy.

First up is easier copy and pasting — after you submit a link, Google will automatically highlight the resulting shortened URL, which means you can immediately hit Control-C to copy it. No, not a huge deal (and rivals like bit.ly already do the same thing), but if you use this as part of your workflow, you’ll appreciate it.

Next, you can now remove URLs that are shown on your dashboard. Again, another minor feature — but one that comes in handy if you’re a big Goo.gl user. As you use the service, it builds a list of URLs you’ve generated and displays how many clicks each has received. But that list got cluttered fast if you frequently used it. Now you’ll be able to highlight your most important links while hiding the ones that you don’t care so much about.

Google also goes out of its way to say that it has had zero downtime since the service launched in September, which is notable because URL shorteners are often criticized for adding additional latency and points of failure to the web.

Finally, you can now report spammy links. Hooray!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The black box that is the Apple review process is creaking open. In a very brief release, Apple has essentially relaxed the requirement that developers use Apple’s own development tools “as long as the resulting apps do not download any code.” They’ve also published some review guidelines, allowing programmers to understand just what will go on behind the curtains in Cupertino.

What does this mean? Well, in the updated SDK license, circa April of this year, a number of paragraphs essentially banned outside development tools including systems that ported Flash, Silverlight, Java, and other platforms to the iPhone. Now, presumably, any app that runs on the iPhone, regardless of source, will be considered. The language is so mushy that it’s still unclear what this actually means.

Read more…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch