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“A number of new countries, including places as varied as Montenegro, Jordan, and Ghana, saw the launch of their first commercial IPTV offerings in 2008,” Michelle Abraham, In-State analyst, said in a statement. “Only a few markets, like Japan and Argentina, remain hamstrung by restrictions that hinder incumbent operators.”

Despite the dire economic climate, the number of such subscriptions is expected to reach 71.6 million by that time, according to market researcher In-Stat’s report.

The telecommunications providers are trying to take on the giants of TV service–satellite and cable.

In-Stat’s report also notes the continuing trend toward convergence, such as the ability to control set-top boxes from PCs and mobile phones.

Telecom-delivered TV–offered in the United States by AT&T and Verizon Communications–includes IPTV, which is television delivered via Internet Protocol. Elsewhere in the world, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telecom, and China Telecom are jumping aboard.

The In-Stat report is another indicator of the growth expected in IPTV, with ABI Research anticipating similar increases in telecom TV subscribers.

Worldwide subscriptions to telecom-delivered TV are expected to grow threefold by 2012, according to a report released Monday.

Key markets over the next few years include Brazil, Korea, and India due to recent regulatory changes that create more favorable conditions for the technology, In-Stat said.

One thing the cloud does, is it will force standardization and penny shaving at the hardware (and software) end. When Amazon, Google, or one of the others is building a big cloud data center, they want utility-grade computing. It has to be dense on MIPS value, meaning it is really compact and cheap for the amount of cpu power delivered. Designs that add 25% to the cost to deliver an extra 10% in power won’t cut it. The Cloud will be too concerned about simply delivering more cores and enough memory, disk, and network speed to keep them happy. Closing a deal to build standard hardware for a big cloud vendor will be hugely valuable, and in fact, Rackable started out life building systems for Google.

Bob Warfield of SmoothSpan has a great post on the trend, and why on earth a data center would settle for more of less in server design:

I’ve actually wondered for some time about when this would happen–the shift by systems vendors from focusing on enterprise IT to focusing on cloud providers. We are a long way off from that being the dominant model (if, indeed, it ever comes to pass that enterprise IT moves entirely to the cloud). However, Rackable seems to have its sights set on meeting the demands of the Googles and Amazons and Microsofts of the world.

(iDataPlex servers) have stripped away unnecessary hardware–a move aimed at reducing power-consuming components and saving space. Heat-tolerant processors allow a data center operator to keep air conditioning bills down, saving as much as 4 percent of total energy costs for each degree dropped. So as computing requires more scale, Google’s innovations influence other buyers and sellers of technology even as the search giant slows its own data center construction.

Google has not disclosed details of its motherboard design, but it did release a white paper calling for designs built on 12V-only power supplies. Besides such supplies, Google’s design is said to use at least two full servers per board and remove many of the unneeded parts found in many mainstream server motherboards in an effort to shave cost, reduce power consumption and increase reliability.

If you have an interest in the architectures that may very well come to dominate the world’s most sophisticated data centers, you should take some time to check out an article in EETimes, entitled “Server makers get Goooogled.”

As does IBM, according to GigaOm’s Stacy Higgenbotham. She notes that IBM has the iDataPlex product line, which was expressly designed for the cloud:

The article, by Rick Merrit, describes new technologies being introduced by Rackable and other companies that are strongly influenced by Google’s custom server designs over the last several years.

I, for one, am actually OK with that.

We’re talking cool stuff here. As the article notes:

Count another one for the Googleplex.

(Bob also notes that the server world for cloud providers will be a little like the aircraft world for Southwest Airlines–a single standard server architecture utilized routinely throughout the data center for several types of workloads. That’s an awesome analog, and one that I’ve considered many times when guessing at utility computing and cloud computing market trends.)

So, those nicely recognizable Dell 2950s or HP DL360 G5s you have stacked in racks in your dev lab will probably be replaced by weird mutant motherboards that couldn’t read a USB stick if their life depended on it. You may never know the ultimate hardware architectures that you come to rely on every single day. Yet your livelihood will depend on hundreds or thousands of them.

So which vendor should you go with if you are seeking the best cloud experience? Ah, here’s the best part. You don’t care. Period. As a cloud consumer, which underlying physical hardware comes into play should arguably be a non-issue, and at worst a fleeting thought as you review your cloud options. This is the beauty of the world we are moving to; it’s someone else’s problem now.

OpenMarket went on to say in its letter that it planned to pass on the charges to its clients.

“Three cents may not sound like a lot, but think about how much profit ESPN generates for sending you the latest Red Sox score,” Brennon Slattery of PC World writes. “Nothing. Raising the fee may eventually discourage companies from participating in the convenient service.”

Even though text volumes have increased, I’m still not sure why Verizon would have to increase rates to cover the cost of delivering the service. SMS text messages cost carriers very little to transmit. In fact, SMS uses a pathway or control channel that already exists in cellular networks to establish communications between cell towers and handsets. Devices are constantly in communication with cell towers to let them know where they are, and the SMS messages are simply delivered along with this normal course of communication.

Given that the carriers haven’t had to do anything extra to enable SMS, I’m not sure why increased volumes would necessitate raising rates to cover increased costs. Right now it seems like SMS is nearly 100 percent profit. So Verizon could use some of those existing profits to invest in some kind of expansion of the service.

Even the mere thought that Verizon is considering upping rates on text messaging is enough to get people worked up, especially since Verizon and the other three major wireless operators in the U.S. have increased the price of sending and receiving texts for consumers by 100 percent over the past two years. Rates have gone from 10 cents a message to 20 cents per message.

That said, Verizon notes it hasn’t increased per-message costs to aggregators since the messaging service began in 2003. Nelson made it clear that nonprofits and political organizations would not be charged extra to send text. And he emphasized that Verizon is still reviewing all its alternatives.

“Specific information in one proposal, which would impose a small per-message fee on for-profit content aggregators for commercial messages, has been mistakenly characterized as a final decision to implement,” he said. “That draft was intended to stimulate internal business discussions and in no way should have been released to the public and represented as a final document.”

“Pursuant to your Commercial Services Agreement with OpenMarket (including former Simplewire Agreements) concerning Third-Party/Operator Fees, in the event message fees are assessed by Verizon for any of your programs, these fees will be passed on to your company at cost.”

Others said it would likely discourage brands like ESPN from using SMS text messaging.

“We are currently assessing how to best address the changing messaging marketplace, and are communicating with messaging aggregators, our valued content partners, our technology business partners and, importantly, our friends in the nonprofit and public policy arenas,” he said in an e-mail. “To that end, we recently notified text messaging aggregators–those for-profit companies that provide services to content providers to aggregate and bill for their text messaging programs–that we are exploring ways to offset significantly increased costs for delivering billions upon billions of text messages each month.”

“Effective Nov. 1, 2008, Verizon will assess a transaction fee of $0.03 for every MT message processed on its network,” the letter said. “Please note that these message fees will apply to standard rate and premium programs. Transaction fees will not apply to Free-2-End-User, Mobile Giving or Non-Profit organizational programs.”

My colleague Sam Diaz at ZDNet said he’d stop using Twitter if the charge was passed along to him.

“Certainly, as someone who updates my own Twitter account somewhat regularly, I’m not inclined to start paying for users to receive my notifications via SMS. If that were the case, I’d just stop using Twitter.”

On Thursday RCR WirelessN News published a story citing a letter that OpenMarket, a direct to consumer messaging service that sends alerts for companies like Google or Orbitz, was sending to its clients explaining that it would have to tack on an additional three cents for every text message that is terminated on Verizon Wireless network.

The blogosphere has been up in arms over the past 24 hours as news spread that Verizon Wireless is planning to increase the per-message fee it charges companies that send text alerts.

But Jeffrey Nelson, a Verizon Wireless spokesman, said the price hike has not been finalized. Still, he acknowledged that Verizon Wireless has been discussing ways to offset increased costs associated with heavy volumes of SMS text messaging on its network.

The letter ignited a firestorm of criticism from bloggers all over the Web who complained that this steep fee hike would kill services like ChaCha, which allows anyone to text a question to a number from their cell phone and receive an answer relatively quickly.

These price hikes come as the volume of text messages has also increased. Last month, the wireless industry association
CTIA reported that 75 billion SMS text messages were sent in June, averaging about 2.5 billion messages a day. This represents an increase of 160 percent over the 28.8 billion messages reported in June 2007.

Coskata and BlueFire Ethanol are two other cellulosic-ethanol companies that plan to turn both wood chips and municipal solid waste into ethanol.

After sorting and drying the waste, Enerkem breaks down the material with heat and pressure using a gasifier. The gasifier creates a synthesis gas that is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. That synthesis gas, or syngas, is then converted into ethanol or other chemicals.

This is some of the equipment used in Enerkem's multistage process for convering waste to fuel.

The company’s process can sort household trash, diverting material that can be recycled and processing the rest into ethanol, a liquid fuel blended with gasoline.

(Credit:
Enerkem)

Rather than stay in the ground, trash from the Three Rivers Landfill in Ponotoc, Miss., will be turned into ethanol.

Montreal-based Enerkem on Thursday announced plans to produce 20 million gallons a year of ethanol from waste at the Mississippi landfill in a project valued at $250 million.

The project is one of only a few in North America to convert waste products into ethanol or electricity using processes that waste-to-energy companies say is cleaner than existing technologies such as incineration.

The “feedstock” for the ethanol will be municipal solid waste, as well as wood residues from forest and agricultural activities, according to Enerkem.

The company, which was founded in 2000, has built a few demonstration facilities in Canada using both municipal solid trash and utility poles as a feedstock. At a conference earlier this month, company CEO Vincent Chornet said the technology is largely developed and that Enerkem is now looking to commercialize the process more broadly.

One area where desktop e-mail programs still beat Gmail is letting users drag and drop their files, which has been seen to work on other Web storage and upload services using a Java applet.

Gmail users can now select multiple attachments and add them simultaneously to an e-mail message. The new system simply opens your operating system’s file explorer, and supports selecting of multiple files at once. Best of all, it includes a status bar for each file as it uploads (just like Flickr’s Flash uploader does) to let you know how far along each file is. This can be comforting if you’re adding a file that’s close to Gmail’s 20MB attachment limit, since you can see something other than a spinning loading icon. It also warns you if you’re over the size limit before the files start moving, which is a nice touch.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

You can now add multiple files at once, and see how far along each one is with upload status bars.

“The web is fragmenting,” said Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks in a press conference on Monday, describing Flux as an “open, flat, and connected” technology. “People are attracted to niches and to what they’re really interested and passionate about, and we as a company have a history in the cable business of going after niches.”

Earlier this month, MTV launched what is arguably its most high-profile social initiative,Backchannel, which uses Flux profiles and credentials to power a game centered around the hit show The Hills.

But the service won’t become an MTV exclusive. “Even though they’re now part of us, we still want them to work with outside Web sites,” Salmi said of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Social Project.

“We will let anyone use the Flux network, with few exceptions,” Dern said, adding that the lone exception is…porn.

MTV Networks launched Flux just over a year ago as a social-networking platform that would be used across all its digital entertainment properties as well as eventually sites outside Viacom. The original Tagworld investment started in November 2006. Flux now powers community features on MTV.com, Colbert Nation, Atom.com, and other Viacom-owned sites, allowing users to access all of them with a single login and profile.

In conjunction, MTV promoted Joshua Dern from vice president of social media strategy to senior vice president and general manager of social media.

NEW YORK–Viacom division MTV Networks announced Monday that it has turned its minority stake in software company Social Platform into a full acquisition: Social Project, formerly known as Tagworld, is the basis for Viacom’s Flux.

Related:
All the glory of the universe, in a single Flash app and XKCD: Height

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

Say you’re shopping for laptops online and you’re trying to figure out how big one is just by its product photo and measurements. It’s not easy is it?

The site is chock full of cell phones, which you can get a good feel for–especially when it comes to holding your old phone side by side. In the photo below I’ve matched it up with T-Mobile’s G1, which may look a little bigger than it should, but keep in mind that it’s sticking out about an inch off the screen. If you find something that’s noticeably off you can vote to have it enlarged or reduced, which instantly changes it by one size measurement.

If you can’t make it to a retailer to get your grubby mitts on it, there’s a new solution called Pective. Like Sizeasy, which I checked out last year, the site is set up to help consumers find out the general size of something based on its measurements. In Pective’s case, the tool goes one step further by using product photos and scaling them to match the size screen you’re using.

Pective was made by Pratham Kumar, whose other projects include
Firefox extension No-NSFW (coverage) and the now defunct 2View.

For the time being you’re only able to browse through the directory 12 shots at a time. On the horizon is a search tool (powered by Yahoo BOSS) and product categories that will let users browse through items by type.

To add your own photo you simply direct the service toward a hosted photo, then crop it down with a built-in editor and plug in its width and height. The entire process only took me about a minute, although I had to track down a properly large, high-resolution shot (which was hosted elsewhere) and the proper measurements. In the future it would be nice to have a search tool that tracks these down for you and lets you upload high-resolution shots from your hard drive.

Pective does a pretty good job matching up T-Mobile's G1 with the on-screen version. It actually looks closer than this, but it's hard to tell since it's sticking an inch off the computer's screen.

The moral of this story: be careful assigning blame to one company or another for problems involving multiple applications and the operating system. Happily, I sidestepped that pothole in my irate tweet, but I confess that inwardly I thought Adobe the culprit since other programs seemed to have no trouble picking Chrome.

Instead, I reinstalled the stable version of Chrome and set it as the default during its installation process. That cleared up Photoshop’s problems, and Lightroom now shows map links in Chrome as well.

All my efforts to set the default browser consfused Photoshop to the point where its browser-based help system wouldn't work at all. Reinstalling Chrome fixed the problem.

But that fix is for the latest developer-preview version of Chrome–the fast-moving, relatively untested version that’s not as reliable as the stable or beta versions Google also offers, which means most folks won’t get it until the changes are better tested. Moreover, I installed the new version and still had the default-browser problem. Though I certainly wouldn’t rule out some error or omission on my part, I decided to try the another fix suggested Thursday in an Adobe blog post by Jeffrey Tranberry: manually setting the default browser.

Vista helpfully offers a “Default Programs” option from the start menu, but then makes it unclear where to perform the action; I tried “Set your default options,” “Associate a file type or protocol with a program,” and “Set program access and computer defaults.”

I had more success with the more straightforward first option, but not without a detour in which Photoshop’s help system wouldn’t load in any browser at all, instead throwing an error message at me suggesting I reinstall the application.

I had a Twitter tirade in January after the umpteenth time that Lightroom showed me the location of a photo in Internet Explorer when I clicked the Lightroom’s GPS photo location icon. Internet Explorer also showed when using Adobe Photoshop’s browser-based help and when Lightroom launched my Flickr page after uploading images to the Yahoo Web site. The problems showed on my home machine with 64-bit Vista, but not my work Windows XP laptop.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Since I helped open this particular can of worms, I feel responsible for sharing the latest news about an issue in which Adobe Systems’ software opens Internet Explorer even when Chrome is set as the default browser.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Windows Vista offers multiple ways to set defaults. I had the best success with the topmost option.

I eventually emerged victorious–but it took a lot of fiddling with Vista and a Chrome reinstallation.

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom’s project manager, was sympathetic and brought the issue up with the company’s engineers. They ultimately pointed the finger at Chrome, though, not at themselves. Lo and behold, the Chrome 2.0.164.0 update included this bug fix: “Fixed several problems with making Google Chrome the default browser on
Windows Vista,” according to Google.

SAN FRANCISCO–Phase one came last week, when Yahoo launched its new profiles site. Phase two begins next week, when Web developers can start sinking their teeth into Yahoo’s attempt to replace its present static design with one that’s customizable, application-rich, socially connected, and woven into other parts of the Internet.

If the strategy works, more people will use Yahoo, and they’ll use it more deeply. “We should see a lot more time spent and bigger engagement with the front page and mail and My Yahoo,” Patel said. “The average Yahoo user who may use two or three things (today) will now start using four or five or six things.”

Neal Sample, Yahoo's chief architect for platforms

New developer tools
Yahoo has opened some developer-oriented projects already, notably BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) for repackaging Yahoo search results, and SearchMonkey for adding new depth and pizzazz to Yahoo’s search results, but those were narrower in scope. At some point next week–Yahoo won’t promise which day exactly–the more powerful tools will go live at the Yahoo Developer Network.

For example, when a commenter is posting on a publisher’s Web site, the publisher could offer the commenter an option to have that activity broadcast on his stream of activity on Yahoo. That would let the commenter share what he’s up to with his contacts while exposing the publisher’s site to more potential readers.

One oft-cited example is a revamped Yahoo Mail that spotlights mail from people’s close contacts. If you spend a lot of time e-mailing your boyfriend, mom, or college roommate, chances are you’ll want to know when they e-mail back.

Developers are essential to what the company calls the Yahoo Open Strategy. Yahoo is building the foundation, but it will be the arrival of others’ applications that will show whether Yahoo’s transformation attempt is fulfilling those hopes.

Yahoo doesn’t want any privacy surprises, though. Each new application must declare to the user exactly what Yahoo services it wants to use and must obtain the users’ permission to do so through a “scary” warning screen: the more services, the more exclamation mark alerts are shown–an interface designed to encourage developers to use the bare minimum and to ensure that users know what they’re getting into, said Neal Sample, Yahoo’s chief architect for platforms.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

And the third level is the services level. Here, Yahoo provides the Yahoo Query Language, a close relative to the Structured Query Language many use to extract data from databases. YQL is designed to make it easier for programmers to extract and process data from Yahoo and many other Web sites, and Yahoo says it’ll do the heavy lifting to make the data workable through YQL.

Overshare?
Of course, users might get the willies thinking about just how much their own activity is becoming part of the information flow of the Internet. Do you really want an application sharing what you do with your friends or indeed the entire world?

Yahoo, of course, hopes receiving invitations from Yahoo members effectively will upsell those outsiders to Yahoo services. “It’s valuable for Yahoo to have a way to draw more users into Yahoo,” Rossiter said.

One level above the social plumbing is the foundation for running applications, called the Yahoo Application Platform. Initially, Yahoo will house standalone applications, but as third parties’ products mature, they’ll also be able to run on Yahoo users’ profile pages, My Yahoo pages, and other locations. Some will even run on the Yahoo.com home page, as long as they can meet tough requirements for high performance.

Applications using the Yahoo foundation can run at Yahoo or outside it, and Yahoo will release a software developer kit to help programmers get started.

“That starts changing Yahoo from a walled garden to the best of the Web,” said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Audience Product Division, speaking to reporters at Yahoo’s Brickhouse site here Friday. Patel has a heavy burden: in his new role, he’s responsible for a major part of Yahoo’s attempt to reverse its fortunes amid a rough economy.

Some socially connected services will require signed-in participation from both a Yahoo user and outsiders. For example, a person could selectively share photos without making them public, and those viewing the photos would have to sign in. Today, such a move requires that all people be Yahoo members, but the company will add a fast, lightweight registration process that can use any e-mail address.

There are three broad categories of technology that developers will get access to next week. At the base is a social platform that applications can use to draw upon Yahoo users’ social connections–as long as users have given permission. While sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace capitalized on the social-networking phenomenon, Yahoo argues that it already has the social data built into its properties. It’s now a matter of bringing it to the fore so applications and users can draw on that information.

This diagram shows various components developers can use to work with the Yahoo Open Strategy.

“Yahoo’s going to put up essentially another skull and crossbones” for each service the application uses, Sample said.

Another example–indeed, the winner of the Yahoo Open Hack 2008 programming contest augmented Yahoo Mail to present all photos a person has sent or received into photo albums. More photos are shared daily on Yahoo than are uploaded to the company’s Flickr photo-sharing site, Patel said, so moves like this could open new windows of activity on Yahoo properties.

And users will have fine control over what’s shared or not. People will be able to broadcast what music they’re listening to publicly while confining their movie habits only to close friends, for example.

“The idea is to create a single social experience that can be shared,” said Jay Rossiter, head of the Yahoo Open Strategy.

Ash Patel, head of Yahoo's Audience Products Division

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News)