EQUTE — The Wall Street Journal says that Google has been testing a new set-top box to create their own schedule and find videos from around the internet and TV shows — and deliver Google ads to everyone.

Google Inc. is testing a new television-programming search service with Dish Network Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving race to combine Internet content with conventional TV.

The service, which runs on TV set-top boxes containing Google software, allows users to find shows on the satellite-TV service as well as video from Web sites like Google’s YouTube, according to these people. It also lets users to personalize a lineup of shows, these people said.

This could be huge, huge, huge for Google, funneling people to its vast media pool from anywhere — YouTube especially. It also means Google ads online and on TV could get heavy rotation. Advertisers not pushing YouTube or preroll ads should take note and start planning for the device.

It surely could flop like many set top boxes, but if it takes off with the same precipitous rise that Tivo did, advertisers without a plan will have to race to catch up.

[Via Wall Street Journal (Subscription required)]

EQUTE — Augmented reality is nothing new, it was featured prominently in James Cameron’s Terminator allowing Arnold Schwarzenegger to see a slew of information on a sort of heads up display.

Now you don’t have you don’t have to be a robot, or even a star to tap into this fascinating space.

Brightkite has implemented augmented reality ad campaigns into its location-based service — based on the sleek Layar browser.

Now, along with restaurants, parks, venues and other GPS points, users of Britekite will see exclusive ads and special augmented-reality-only offers. Best Buy has signed on through the rest of the year, and others will likely follow.

It’s an interesting development, but a basic one at the heart — reach your public where they live.

The only touchy subject is scaring your public from the places they live. If their augmented reality browser is suddenly full of ads, they may be turned off and find another browser or go back to their own reality altogether.

EQUTE — Twitter is getting even more business friendly with co-tweets.

This is a wonderful addition to any tweeting company, instead of having one master account and a dedicated “tweetologist” or passing around the Twitter login (unwise).

Now people can be invited to tweet under the company Twitter account along with a byline. The benefits are endless in news organizations, segmented companies, blogger networks where there are many people involved in content that don’t necessarily interact. By allowing them to tweet under the company account it gives the account more depth, and if someone on a newspaper’s politics beat is tweeting great stuff, they will get their own followers and fans.

This neat trick could also scale to huge companies or franchises, allowing project leads or franchise managers tweet their hot sellers, or interesting stories — giving transparency, internal communication and valuable, personal information to followers.

On a grassroots level, the trick could be used to run a neighborhood watch or even a apartment twitter party.

Anamitra, of Twitter, described the feature (currently in beta) in the Twitter blog

The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ — it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.

It’s the next step beyond lists, giving tweeting organizations control of what their fans see beyond lists that still feature the ubiquitous “I like sandwiches and beer” comments.

One can only hope the feature is rolled out to the general public sooner than later.

EQUTE — Google and Facebook have jumped into the URL shortener ring in a move that could crush other services like Bit.ly and Ow.ly.

The move could finally be an answer to all those Twitter links that you don’t want to go anywhere near. Seeing these shortened URLs will give readers an additional layer of security by knowing that their clicks aren’t going to some phishery or virus-laden site.

Google’s goo.gl has a very, very short page describing their new service.

Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:

Stability — ensuring that the service has very good uptime

Security — protecting users from malware and phishing pages

Speed — fast resolution of short URLs

Google URL Shortener is currently available for Google products and not for broader consumer use.

The Google toolbar now features a new share button that shortens the URLs, and Blogger now allows users to syndicate their feeds to Twitter using the shortened URLs.

Facebook’s shortener seems more designed to bring outside users to Facebook, or the new FB.me. It also features a neat trick to direct readers to the site with an easy to understand link. Say the Facebook name for your blog’s fan site is StarTrekPlanet, it can be truncated to FB.me/startrekplanet, making it easy for people to see where they are going.

These URL services also leave the window open for things similar to Digg’s approach where each site found through the shortener features a toolbar header. If Google and Facebook did the same it could mean greater reach for their sharing services.

This is a great stride in the field, it will certainly be interesting to see how third-party services weather the storm.

EQUTE — Ever since the 80s, Internet engineers have worried about the scarcity of IP addresses, but now engineers say the problem is in the 11th hour.

So will the Internet blow up and send us back to the dark ages? Probably not, but it could still cause some problems.

“I suspect we are actually beyond a reasonable time frame where there won’t be some disruption. Now it’s more a question of how much,” said David Conrad, the general manager of IANA.

Experts say the problem could come to head in the next few years with IPv4 addresses running out between 2010 and 2013. Experts said their estimates were based on routine address use and not the inevitable mad dash for IP addresses at the end of the line.

The spread of the Internet is aggravating the scarce supply even more. Broadband connections and blocks of IP addresses given to companies mean fewer and fewer addresses. Inefficient address use is also a big drain on addresses; companies that have big blocks of addresses assign them to their printers, copiers, fax machines and all their computers instead of running all those assets through a LAN. The mobile Internet boom is also causing problems, draining addresses faster and faster as it takes off.

There are some options that Internet architects have when facing the inevitable end of IPv4 addresses.

There has been talk of reclaiming addresses, but the huge cost and possible legal wrangling necessary for something like that make it a near impossibility.

Running LANs is another option to slow the growth of unused internal addresses hidden behind company firewalls. But this can’t create new addresses, it can only slow it down.

The real solution looks to be IPv6, but until it sees a huge boost from every angle, the number of people using would have to skyrocket. Google says that only 1 percent of computers are using IPv6 standards, according to a 2008 study. Already, 4G Internet service is being designed to use IPv6 instead of IPv4 but everyone else has to catch up.

So the world likely won’t end when IP addresses run out, neither will your sites, but there is little doubt that it will cause problems big and small for some people. So plan ahead, get an extra IP address or two soon if you think you’ll need it and get ready for the switch to IPv6 (or switch now).

EQUTE — ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has recently announced efforts to adopt non-English characters in domain names.

The news could be a major change in the way the Internet is set up, turning the focus away from the US and letting countries have a more localized way to access the internet. ICANN said that of the 1.6 billion people on the Internet, over half use non-Latin characters.

“This is an extremely important meeting for ICANN, since the IDN program is moving one step closer to reshaping the global Internet landscape,” ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom said in a statement. “In Seoul, we plan to move forward to the next step in the internationalization of the Internet, which means that eventually people from every corner of the globe will be able to navigate much of the online world using their native language scripts.”

ICANN brass went on to say that it’s not just a half-baked idea, they have been working on implementing such changes for years.

“We’re confident that it works because we’ve been testing it now for a couple of years,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN’s board, said in a statement. “And so we’re really ready to start rolling it out.”

They admit that there will be some hurdles to leap when the IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) roll out, namely that many applications won’t work with the new URLs. But they are putting up measures that take aim at people who would grab up convenient domains from other countries. ICANN has a “meaningfulness requirement” stating that the domain must mean something.

China is pushing for the new IDNs, and if they do roll out on a broad scale, applications would surely follow.

It will be interesting to see what happens if this does happen, it may mean a greater segregation of the internet — which could be a good thing and it could help advertisers by clearly showing who is using sites and seeing ads.

EQUTE — Fans of the iPhone, iTunes and iEverything else are taking offense to the new Google Droid commercials — and they are using iMovie to react.

Some fans created a video poking fun at the commercials, which pick apart Apple’s closed-door policy and DRM-laden music store. It might turn out to be quite a geek war, but one wonders how it will really effect mobile marketing — but currently both Droid and Apple’s OS allow about the same type of ads.

Like the Yahoo-Microsoft deal in reverse, the big Droid push could bring some more competition from Google to the mobile marketing industry. This is, of course, if enough people adopt the Droid system. With Verizon jumping on the bandwagon with a future Droid phone and T-Mobile flooding TV with MyTouch 3G commercials, there should be ample adopters who didn’t jump at the iPhone.

And as we all know, competition breeds innovation — so let the geek war begin!

EQUTE — Users of Google Webmaster Tools woke up to see what has become a prevalent statistic for many site owners absent from the webmaster tool set.

Google has discontinued the use of PageRank in the webmaster tool reports, though it still appears in the Google Toolbar — and will likely stay. Google says that they removed it because people were using the ranking as the only statistic that mattered, even though it was far from it.

Though PageRank can still be a good broad measure of a sites performance and an indicator of a change, but most SEO experts know that there are other tools in the webmaster toolset and elsewhere that are updated more frequently and offer more information.

EQUTE — A new bill concerning what would happen if the United States were under a cyber attack has some people wondering just what kind of powers the president will have over the Internet.

The cyber security bill says that in the event of an “immediate threat to strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network — may declare a cyber security emergency.”

This emergency declaration would give the White House power to disconnect computers from the Internet; which has some privacy advocates frothing at the mouth. While nobody with much clout really things this means Obama is going to take our Internet away, they do question the language.

“I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness,” Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, told CNET. “It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill.”

Anyone who has read a lot of Senate bills knows that vagary is commonplace in the legislature. When CNET asked lawmakers to elaborate, they did.

The president of the United States has always had the constitutional authority, and duty, to protect the American people and direct the national response to any emergency that threatens the security and safety of the United States. The Rockefeller-Snowe Cybersecurity bill makes it clear that the president’s authority includes securing our national cyber infrastructure from attack. The section of the bill that addresses this issue, applies specifically to the national response to a severe attack or natural disaster.

— Jena Longo, deputy communications director for the Senate Commerce committee.

This bill seems to have been designed to combat the current rise of botnets and hijacked computers.
This bill wouldn’t, however, be the means to simply turn off the Internet as some fear. If a botnet attack is coming from a single gateway (public or private), it could be shut down until the source of the problem is found.

So, in the case of a disaster or mass attack from hackers, your Internet might be shut down if you have the misfortune of sharing a building or ISP with hackers.

EQUTE — The internet is getting up there, and it’s showing some real signs of a mid-life crisis.

There won’t be any fancy cars or vapid trophy wives at casa de Internet, the crisis is internal, but could affect how people do everything on the Internet.

What began as a little military project, Arpanet spread like wildfire, spawning innovation and plenty of procrastination, but some Internet experts think that innovation is slowing down greatly as more regulation comes to the Internet and ISPs put the kibosh on tools that could let it grow further.

Basically, the crisis is one of “net-neutrality,” or the idea of keeping an unrestricted gateway into the Internet.

Internet service providers have been bottle-necking the speed of file sharing, a move that saw Comcast censured by the FCC. And some other ISPs are charging extra for everyday use of the Internet — putting caps on data and charging more for watching things like Netflix Watch it Now videos. Even innovators like Apple are restricting the Internet, swinging their ban hammer at applications galore.

While it might seem like an inconvenience more than a crisis, this bottlenecking could stand in the way of future innovation or new ways of finding media on the Internet.

“You are less likely to try things out,” Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the Internet’s founding fathers, told the Associated Press. “No one wants a surprise bill at the end of the month.”

If puritanical influences, for instance, had stopped Internet pornography back when it first arrived, video on the Internet could be drastically different — high-quality streaming video found on Hulu or Netflix might never have been.

It’s exactly the same argument now, if ISPs start charging for greater bandwidth usage, they run the risk of people staying away from stunning sites like Vimeo or even major network TV station sites just to keep their bill in check.

Bottom line, innovation comes when we least expect it — like silly putty bouncing out of a government explosive lab. The Internet needs some breathing room to continue growing.