This week’s Democratic National Convention could go down in history as the one with the most mentions of green and clean technology. In attendance were members of the newly formed group Cleantech for Obama, which was created to help rally the cleantech community behind Barack Obama, and spearhead fundraising.

Several national co-chairs of the organization, including Sunil Paul, Jason Scott, Josh Becker, Aimee Christensen, Jeff Anderson and Andrew Beebe, helped put together a reception near the convention center in Denver on Tuesday afternoon. Carol Browner, former EPA administrator and Albright Group principal, who is an Honorary Co-Chair of the Cleantech for Obama organization was signed up as a “special guest” at the event.

But the DNC appears to be just a warm-up for Clean Tech for Obama. Next Wednesday, Sept. 3, the group is holding a launch event in downtown San Francisco, called the “CT4O” (Cleantech 4 Obama) Thoughtraiser, dubbed a “townhall-style dialogue.” The lineup includes introductory remarks from Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and speeches from Google’s Dan Reicher; green collar job advocate Van Jones; UC Berkeley energy researcher Dan Kammen; Steve Westly, former California State Comptroller and Managing Partner of the Westly Group; and Heather Zichal, Energy and Environmental Policy Staff Adviser for the Obama Campaign.

The upcoming event, along with the rousing endorsement speech by Nth Power investor Nancy Floyd at the DNC this week, shows just how high-profile cleantech has become in political circles. With the high prices of gas and concerns over global warming hitting the news at the same time as the election cycle, politics has been swept up by a variety of energy plans from well-known politicians.

Obama’s comprehensive strategy to tackle carbon emissions is the hands-down favorite of the cleantech crowd — his campaign has grabbed donations from cleantech investors 6 to 1 over McCain. And he has the added clout of his official vice president choice, Joe Biden, who has been pushing for climate change and energy legislation for decades.

While Apple’s television ads show off brawny and multilingual applications for the iPhone, the vast majority of those available in the much-ballyhooed app store seem to be glorified four-function calculators. Of course, just as the modern computer emerged from the simple electronic adding machine, many of these apps hold the potential to grow into something impressive. But when?

This puts the app buyer in a tough spot — who’s going to shell out real money for something that doesn’t do much now but perhaps, down the line, could evolve into a killer app? On the flip side, what’s an app developer to do? Risk losing market share by taking time to create a truly robust application or rush something out the door and fix it on the fly?

These thoughts came to me when I was testing out a potentially very cool app today called RunKeeper. The app uses the GPS in your phone to track how far and fast you’ve traveled on your run, bike ride or journey to your local Starbucks. The app works fine, collecting GPS data many times a minute and displaying your run time and speed in a bar graph as well as a map. But $9.99 is lot to ask for something I could do with a cheap digital watch and GMap pedometer for free.

FitnessKeeper, the startup that makes RunKeeper, says they’re adding a number of features their forum members have been suggesting. Founder Jason Jacobs explained their strategy as such: “Instead of sitting in a vacuum and developing a laundry list of features we’re not sure people would use, we’d rather get a product out early and be very nimble and really grow with our community.” But with a price tag of ten bucks, it’s an expensive app that doesn’t offer a huge amount of functionality yet.

It been less than two months since the app store went live, and I’ve downloaded scores of app updates, but no updates have yet offered serious upgrades. App developers will have to show that they are dedicated to keeping their offerings fresh if they expect users to pay up front.

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AT&T, the largest phone company in the U.S., may buy UK-based Cable & Wireless, according to The Guardian. The rumors were prompted by a research report by a local stock broker.

Cable & Wireless is one of those telecoms whose fortunes have followed the trajectory of William Shattner’s small screen career. It may have been Captian Kirk at one time, but now all it does is pitch cheap tickets and hotel rooms. Sorry, I meant it is a telecom company selling services to businesses.

Regardless, it is not such a bad rumor and makes sense for AT&T, which needs to make a move that moves the needle on its revenues, and C&W fits the bill. Cable& Wireless has a market capitalization of $8.5 billion and sales of $6 billion. AT&T clearly needs to do something — it is losing traction in the U.S. residential market at a dangerous clip, with customers defecting to wireless or cable companies.

A few months ago, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, in an interview with USA Today, talked about making an audacious move — a big global partnership or a deal. “If you’re not pushing forward hard, nothing happens … You don’t do that by making little incremental moves. You’ve got to make big moves,” he told the daily. Maybe this (buying C&W) qualifies as a big move in San Antonio!

image courtesy trekcore.com

Sometimes I have a hard time trusting videos that claim police brutality, but this piece, produced by the Rocky Mountain News, is undeniable evidence that some of the Denver police corralling protesters at the Democratic National Convention are going too far.

And Steve Bryant reviews one of the Internet’s most valuable resources — the Plain English series, which uses paper cutouts and simple stop motion to explain extremely complicated subjects (and zombies). Check it out at NewTeeVee Station!

Hollywood Studios Band Together for “Open Market;” initiative is a set of policy decisions and software and services framework to enable DRM interoperability. (TechCrunch)

New Research Looks at Online Video “Super Sharers;” Sharpe Partners reports that 75 percent of super sharers find ways to skip ads, and video isn’t about creative expression as much as it’s about sharing real life experiences. (MarketWatch)

CNET Gets a Redesign; videos are now embeddable!

MyToons Partners with Vuze; animation community to provide vintage animation channel for the BitTorrent video network. (release)

I-Rights to Distribute Do You Believe Me?; new online series from producers of Sofia’s Diary is about a 17-year old girl with recurring nightmares. (C21Media)

Nielsen: 114.5 Million TV Households for 2008 - 2009 Season; increase of 1.5 percent over last year. (release)

Toyota (TM) says it has rolled back its sales predictions for the upcoming year, but the company remains committed to hybrid car production and its plans to produce an electric vehicle to compete with rival auto manufacturers.

Despite a 700,000-vehicle predicted drop in sales, Toyota says it is still on the path toward its goal of selling 1 million hybrids a year by the early 2010s. The company also announced that Toyota would start producing an electric car by early next decade, which offers a direct challenge to the plans of Nissan and Mitsubishi that plan to mass produce their own electric vehicles within the next two years. Toyota stock rose slightly, indicating that The Street agrees with the company’s pursuit of efficient technologies.

Are slower sales sign of tough economic times? Yes, of course, but they also point out that Toyota can’t get away with producing larger, fuel inefficient vehicles any more than Ford or GM or Chrysler. Toyota’s big sales drops have, like Detroit’s big three, largely come in the full-sized truck and large car segments. Hybrid and small car sales remain robust.

The heart of Toyota’s future growth remains hybrid vehicles, and Toyota is not slacking off on its hybrid push one iota. Toyota still plans to unveil the next-gen Prius as promised, on schedule, next year as well as to introduce a new Lexus hybrid. It’s also forging ahead with other, more fuel efficient models. President Katsuaki Watanabe says Toyota plans to use the foreseen slowdown to streamline its already lean manufacturing operations, making its production system in the U.S. more agile, and to develop more hybrid cars and other fuel-efficient vehicles.

The undercurrent here seems to be, ‘OK, we were a little off in our production estimates, but we’re still pressing ahead with the next Prius, and we’re serious about producing an electric car too!’ To which we can all say, “Good!”

We’re obsessed with synchronizing content between computers, and SugarSync from Sharpcast not only syncs regular documents and photos between computers, but also between mobile phones. So it’s fitting that we let you know that Sharpcast has announced an iPhone app available free to anyone who subscribes to the SugarSync software. Consumers can use the iPhone to access their SugarSync file repository online and manage or view files on all their computers. For a complete rundown of SugarSync, check out the review at Web Worker Daily.

Om thinks having an iPhone app gives Sugar Sync (and Buffalo, which offers remote access to its storage drives through an iPhone app) a real competitive advantage against folks like Dropbox or FolderShare. I’m not sure I agree with him. He’s right when he says storage startups are a dime a dozen, and have to do something to stand out from the crowd, but the iPhone is still an aspirational and consumer device. Plenty of people don’t have them yet. Small business owners are the ones buying Buffalo drives, and given the troubles with MobileMe they might wait before taking on the iPhone. Adding more smart phone access beyond the iPhone would be a better way to stand out in my opinion, but I might just be a bitter Blackberry owner.

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After the Florida Public Service Commission unceremoniously shuttered FPL’s leading utility green power program earlier this month, citing high marketing and sales costs, Green Mountain Energy has released data disputing the claim.

Costs for sales and marketing accounted for just 52 percent of Green Mountain’s revenues. That figure is comparable to other top-ranked programs in the U.S., including Portland General Electric. Thor Hinckley, green power program manager for PGE, says Green Mountain Energy spends 56 percent of its budget on marketing costs for the Portland program.

The Florida PSC told Earth2Tech in early August that voluntary programs like FPL’s were no longer necessary, thanks to the state’s forthcoming Renewable Portfolio Standard.

As you’re all aware by now, some of the staff at WWD have gone the iPhone 3G route - and are still happy about it. But we don’t have any sort of official “iPhone only” policy, and we’re a diverse bunch. Speaking for myself, I’ve taken a long, hard look at iPhone ownership, and decided against it. Here’s why.

1. 3G Coverage - I’m in that big middle part of the country where, apparently, all the technologically backwards people live. None of the major carriers have anything like comprehensive 3G coverage out here. With the iPhone, that means I’d be paying 3G prices for a device that didn’t get 3G speeds - not much of a bargain.

2. Missing Flash - I’m not a huge fan of Flash user interfaces; I use Firefox add-ons to disable most of them in my browser. But there are a few spots on the web where Flash is an essential part of the site functionality, including Grand Central, which I use to manage all of my phone numbers. As long as there’s no Flash on the iPhone, that’s a deal-breaker for me.

3. Apple Control and Censorship - It’s bad enough that Apple is managing the App Store as a tightly gated software portal with apparently arbitrary rules and poor developer communication. It’s bad enough that they have a “kill switch” that lets them remove any software from your iPhone at any time. But now they’re getting into content censorship as well. The notion of having a computer where Apple dictates, now and forever, what software I can install rubs me intensely the wrong way.

4. Gadget Regret - As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve got some history with gadget regret. I’ve learned over the years to step outside the reality distortion field and ask whether I really need a new toy. With the iPhone, the answer is currently “no” - the amount of money it would cost, balanced against the amount of difference it would make for my ability to enjoy life or bill more, makes it a bad deal for me.

5. The SDK NDA - Apple appears to be bending over backwards to make it tough for developers to build useful iPhone applications. Besides their control issues on software delivery, they’re also still keeping the iPhone SDK under a restrictive NDA. This goes beyond closed source to closed knowledge, and strikes me as a bad idea and one that I do not care to support.

So, no iPhone for me. For a phone, I’m still happy with my old, beat-up, not-very-smart Nokia. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you’re thinking of plopping down the money for an iPhone I’d urge you to think carefully about whether it’s really a device that will make your life better.

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While cleantech investors are betting that global warming will make their investments perform well, most publicly-traded companies have had their head in the sand when it comes to warning its investors about the financial risks of global warming. That is until now — in an agreement between environmental crusader New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and Minnesota-based Xcel Energy (XEL), the utility will disclose to its investors in detail the risks global warming pose to its business. This first of its kind disclosure could be a sign of things to come for the electricity generation industry, the single largest contributor to the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the agreement, Xcel will disclose in SEC filings the risks of future climate change regulation and legislation, climate-change related litigation and physical impacts of climate change. Additionally, Xcel will also disclose its current carbon emissions, projected emissions from proposed coal power plants and its plans to reduce emissions.

Xcel already provides such information to the voluntary Carbon Disclosure Project and in its annual “triple-bottom-line” report. Xcel estimates that, at $9 per ton (lower than EU prices, but higher than current prices on RGGI), its carbon emission would have cost the company $603 million last year, according to TwinCities.com.

In 2007, Xcel reported just $577 million in profit. (Numbers like these are why banks have been taking into consideration what carbon regulation could mean for their investments and scaled back their plays in areas like coal.)

Xcel is the first of five utilities subpoenaed by Cuomo. The Attorney General’s office is still negotiating with AES Corp., Dominion, Dynegy and Peabody Energy. In the carbon-constrained economy of the future, just as the SEC likes to keep track of corporations’ financial dealings, they will want to know about companies’ carbon dealings as well.

The German magazine Die Welt has scored an exclusive interview with Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony. Maybe you have PlayStation 3 sitting in your living room or recall that Sony won the high-definition DVD format war with its Blu-Ray technology? In this interview Stringer sets his sights higher, on the domination of home networking. He says,

I set the target, to be achieved by March 2011, of a product portfolio in which 90 percent of the devices will be capable of networking and connecting wirelessly. It’s a tall order. Our engineers have to work across all our divisions in order to develop standards. This includes the consumer electronics division as well as the film and music production units.

Looks like Sony hopes to follow in Apple’s footsteps with a proprietary standards-based home entertainment platform. Stringer also points out that Apple, with its interests in Pixar, are pursuing a hardware-plus-content strategy like Sony is, albeit on a smaller scale. However, for anyone who has had to deal with Sony’s cumbersome software, the idea of that company pursuing such a strategy is both laughable and scary. You laugh because getting stuck on Sony software (and its DRM) is so terrible, but at the same time it’s frightening because many consumers will be eager to embrace any end-to-end home networking solution. Plus, Sony does make great hardware.

Stringer also expresses his dissatisfaction with the joint venture his firm has with Ericsson. The mobile equipment company makes several platforms for use in Sony mobile devices, but Stringer is apparently unhappy with the cooperation between the two partners. He told the magazine, “It’s certainly been a difficult year, but, buying out a partner is never an easy thing.”

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I was talking to an executive at a major label the other day. We were talking about startups and he noted that they either sue these companies out of business or legitimize them out of business. That is not far from the truth. How many legitimate, standalone digital businesses can you name that rely on licenses from the labels for their primary business and are profitable? Let’s categorize by business model:

E-Commerce/Transaction-based: iTunes immediately comes to mind. It may be profitable on its own, but we all know that Apple’s main business is to sell iPods and now iPhones. eMusic is the other one, and I think it has a real business on its hands — of course the vast majority of its repertoire is non-major label.

Music Subscriptions: This segment is dominated by Rhapsody and Napster. Neither is solely a music subscription service, but that’s what both are best known for. At any rate, neither is profitable. RealNetworks’ music business lost $1.9 M in the second quarter of this year. Napster? Well its stock chart kinda says it all; it’s currently trading for a little less than the cash it has on its books.

Ad-Supported Music: This includes on-demand audio and video and also Internet radio. The major players here are the radio divisions of companies like Yahoo, AOL, CBS (Last.fm and CBS Radio), MTV, Clear Channel, MySpace, Facebook and then independents like iMeem, Last.fm, Pandora, Live365 (my alma mater) and a number of others. It has been widely reported that the standard license for on-demand consumption is $0.01 per play, which amounts to a $10 cost-per-thousand plays, not including other costs such as publishing, bandwidth/streaming and ad sales and serving costs.

In short, I think its very hard for any of the ad-supported players to build a meaningful basis from licensed music. Instead, many of the larger players will use it as part of a larger strategy to attract audiences and offer related products that generate higher-margin revenues. For instance, Clear Channel might have a sponsor for its Stripped series, which will probably not have the same license cost as a regular music video. Or MySpace will sell an ad campaign around an event that it hosts. As for Internet radio, there is a lower royalty rate, but the CPMs are lower, too. Pandora’s founder was recently quoted as saying the service may have to throw in the towel if things don’t change with the fee structure. iMeem has licenses from several labels but it’s been reported that it gave up a significant piece of the company and agreed to onerous terms, so, needless to say, it likely isn’t profitable on its licensed music either.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of business models nor of the companies within each segment, and there may be companies within each that are profitable. But that’s beside the point.

The point is that the labels have been lulled into the conviction that their rates are ‘market’ since some of companies have been willing to pay such rates to license music as a loss leader. The labels have been penny-wise and pound-foolish in cutting deals with seemingly lucrative rates. However, that is not the recipe for a vibrant, competitive ecosystem of licensees large and small, with no one company having too much market share — which is exactly what I’d want if I were in their shoes.

The good news is that I know this has been recognized by people with the major labels, and they’re experimenting with new licensing schemes. Hopefully it’s not too late.

Raghav “Rags” Gupta is VP of International Partnerships at Brightcove, where he has worked since ‘05. His blog can be found at www.ragsgupta.com.

A couple days ago, WWD’s Mike Gunderloy commented on the New York Times’ coverage of Chrysler’s UConnect technology, bringing internet connectivity to their vehicle line up.

As the NYT rightly pointed out, road safety is becoming an increasingly diminished quality as legislation duels with user’s desire to remain connected (but distracted) on the road.

Coincidentally, Volkswagen recently revealed its T-6 concept vehicle - quite literally an office on wheels - that appears to be larger than a VW Camper and a cross between Tom Cruise’s ride in Minority Report and Tron’s Lightcycles!

Alexander Zhukovsky’s design explores the notion of a full functional office and conference room on wheels - admittedly a well executed design, but perhaps missing the rising trends of telecommuting, coworking and a better civic infrastructure. Adding larger, more featured vehicles to strained road infrastructures isn’t really a solution to a problem many cities face.

Great design is about solving problems and imagining a path to better futures - the T-6 symbolizes all that’s wrong with auto-centric, workaholic cultures. Your experience as a passenger is more likely to resemble Tom Scott’s hilarious Tea Party In A Transit than an orderly business meeting!

Read more about the T-6 concept at The Design blog…

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U.S. Utilities are increasingly adding solar to their power portfolios as a way to meet state mandates that call for a percentage of renewable power. So far we’ve counted more than 30 utility-scale — we’re saying one megawatt or greater — solar projects that are in various stages of development across the U.S. Big solar is only going to get bigger. Check out the map and read the full story over at Earth2Tech.

The nice thing about most popular YouTube videos is that they require no translation (especially the global language of a guy getting kicked in the nuts). But for more conversational vids, it might be nice to offer subtitles so the whole world can understand what you are saying. To help out, YouTube has launched a captions feature to its videos.

With captions, video uploaders can add a translation into a foreign language, provide clarification for garbled dialog or make the video more accessible to the hard of hearing. In order to add captions, you’ll need to have files with captions or subtitles in them, created using software or a service. Once added, the captions can be accessed by clicking on the arrow in the lower right hand corner of the video. Like video annotations, captions don’t seem to work with embeds.

There’s been a bigger push for more accessibility of web videos, Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is backing a bill that would require major web video producers to include captioning and video descriptions that describe the action for the blind. Elsewhere, dotSUB is a free browser based wiki-type tool to provide video translations.

It’s hotter than the lights at the Pepsi Center in the world of solar funding this week. On the heels of the news that thin-film solar startup Nanosolar has raised $300 million (bringing its total funding to half a billion dollars), solar startup AVA Solar announced late Wednesday it has raised a massive $104 million in equity financing from DCM, Technology Partners, GLG Partners, Bohemian Companies, and Invus.

AVA is working on making thin-film photovoltaics out of cadmium telluride — the same material that has boosted First Solar to its solar darling status — so everyone is interested to see how the company will stack up to the leader. In some of the Fort Collins-based company’s literature it boasts it can produce solar PV modules at a cost below $1/watt. First Solar calls its manufacturing cost per watt of $1.14/watt for the first quarter of 2008, “the lowest in the industry;” that production cost will also likely come down over the coming months and years.

We’ll see what AVA’s production costs end up being after it starts up its 200-megawatt solar PV factory sometime this year. The company appears to be using a similar process to First Solar, depositing a thin layer of cadmium telluride on glass.

AVA says it has reached “distributed conversion efficiencies around 11.5 percent” — First Solar has similar efficiency, and has reported an average of 10.7 percent with its cells, and a goal of 12 percent.

If AVA could end up being able to produce its PV more cheaply than First Solar, it would put them in a good position to enter the new, massive market of utility-scale and rooftop solar. First Solar brought in revenues of $267 million for the most recent quarter, 36 percent above the $196 million in the previous quarter and more than three times larger than the $77 million in the second quarter of 2007.

It’s not always hip to be a company a little later to the game. Eric Wesoff and the Greenlight crew, who tipped off the story of AVA’s funding yesterday, talked to investors that passed on AVA’s funding, because the valuation was too high, and the deal was too much of a copycat of First Solar. But AVA could still create a sizable business. AVA was incubated out of the labs at Colorado State University with a partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and formed in January 2007.

Newly-launched QuarkBase makes the somewhat grandiose claim of providing “everything about a website.” But it turns out that this mashup of various information into a single (extensive) page actually does a pretty good job of delivering on that claim. It’s as easy to use as you could hope: jsut enter a URL and hit the search button. Quarkbase will go out to a bunch of services and pull together information to help you get an overview of the site’s purpose, traffic, and importance.

Among other things, you’ll get a snapshot of the current site, links to related and similar sites, popularity measurements based on social web tracking, del.icio.us bookmarks, traffic from Alexa, and mentions in other blogs and on Twitter. There are a few areas that could stand improvement - for example, tweets aren’t linked, and the technical info isn’t as deep as that provided by, say, Netcraft’s page. But overall, it’s a fast way to get a birds-eye view of any site on the web.

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“Where’s my money?!”

That’s a phrase that I used to scream at my monitor whenever difficult clients would skip payments for weeks at a time or, worse, if they would skip paying completely.

Many things have changed since then, and my experience with such clients early in my web working career has made me savvy to such escape tactics. In the end, only one client was successful in evading me. I didn’t let him get out scot-free, either - I reported his company to the Better Business Bureau.

When it comes to money, I believe that prevention is better than cure. Having a mutually signed-contract is the first step you need to take to ensure that the client will be taking your agreement seriously. I also find that a ‘layman’s version’ of the contract can help clients better understand what they’re signing if the legalese gets in the way. However, don’t forget to add a disclaimer that the layman’s version in no way replaces the actual contract.

Sometimes, this stage can be a litmus test to see if the client will have payment problems later on. Red flags go up when potential clients are reluctant to sign a contract because “It’s only a couple of weeks’ work anyway”. But if the deal pulls through, there are other things you can do to ensure that you get paid on time.

Have a clear schedule of deliverables. It’s important to write a list of deliverables for both you and your client - including the payment. Note the following example for an ebook writing project:

August 28 - Client sends materials and initial deposit.
August 30 - You send your proposed outline to the client.
September 2 - Client sends you comments/suggestions for outline.
September 3 - You send the finalized outline to the client.
September 15 - You send the first chapter of the ebook to the client.
September 20 - Client makes second payment, and sends additional comments.

Also, when you send each invoice, don’t forget to note the payment due date. While some clients won’t need reminders, be mindful of which clients tend to be too busy to forget the due date so that you can send them a reminder the day before.

Find a way to make early payments beneficial to the client. One of the things we’ve decided to implement is to give a client a 5% discount if they pay the invoice within 24 hours from the time it was sent. Another alternative you might want to try is giving a discount or promo coupon for the client’s next order.

Have template emails ready. To save yourself some time and the stress of composing payment reminder emails, it helps to have ready templates. I make templates for payment reminders the day after the due date, the week after, and two weeks after. I just adjust the details of the letter to the situation.

Call the client. Emails are easy to delete and prone to misunderstandings, which is why for clients who make delinquent payments, it’s important to call them if you aren’t paid after two weeks - especially if they haven’t replied to your emails. There could be a completely valid reason behind this, but it’s important to hear it from your client directly.

Make yourself indispensable. I had a client who, even after signing the contract and getting satisfactory work from us, decided to leave us hanging when it came to his final payment. The above methods didn’t seem to work - until he needed us to make a minor change on his website. Of course, we only made the changes he requested when he paid the remaining balance. Sometimes, being indispensable can be good insurance that a client won’t run off without paying you for your work.

However, once you realize that a client has this kind of habit, it’s best to stop working with them. You don’t want to risk being left unpaid for a project should they decide one day that they don’t need you anymore.

Don’t be a fool. If a client is notorious for making excuses and avoiding you during payment time, it makes no sense to trust them for succeeding projects. Use your instinct, and if you think chasing them for your fees isn’t worth it, suggest that they find someone else (to annoy).

Have you ever had problematic clients who left you unpaid? How did you try to get your money?

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Despite its delays launching its Xohm 4G mobile WiMAX network, Sprint has not been idle. The carrier said this morning it would work with a variety of businesses to bring location-based services to the Xohm network when it launches in September. It sounds neat, and the partners listed below could make for a good location-based services experience, but right now mobile WiMAX is a data card strategy without handsets.

That makes location more of gimmicky feature for browsing on your laptop than the awesome-to-have feature on your mobile phone. However, it’s well in line with recent attempts to add location to browsing through Yahoo’s Fire Eagle platform, or older attempts with the use of Skyhook’s Loki software. If Sprint’s open network strategy for Xohm attracts other devices such as personal navigation systems, this could become a more interesting offering, and lead to products as cool as the Dash Express.These features will carry over once the joint venture between Sprint and Clearwire for nationwide WiMAX gets going at the end of the year. Below the fold are the names of companies adding location to the Xohm network.

uLocate Communications Inc.: Will provide its Where platform and friend-finding application Buddy Beacon to connect Xohm customers with their favorite people, places and things.

Yelp Inc.: Will provide local business reviews and ratings for anything local, from restaurants to doctors and more. The reviews can be searched and sorted by category or shown in a map view, with access to Yelp.com for details on any of the three million local reviews.

Eventful Inc.: Will provide users with listings of local events displayed in a map view. Customers can select sub-categories of interest, search for events and click through to Eventful.com to get more event information and purchase tickets.

Topix LLC: Will provide local news based on current location as a summary, with an option to read full stories.

NAVTEQ: Will offer Xohm customers real-time local traffic and commuter updates with links to the Traffic.com site for additional detailed construction, incident and drive time information.

AccuWeather: Will provide three-day forecasts based on users’ current locations. An easy link to AccuWeather.com mobile web site gives more forecast details, radar/satellite images and more.

Google Inc.: Contributes local search capability along with additional features and functionality from Google Maps.

Openwave Systems Inc.: Will provide the location platform that enables Xohm partners to use location to provide services.

Autodesk Inc.: Will provide a standards-based interface and geospatial services, such as addresses, ZIP code and city/state information, to enhance location within the Xohm network.

image of the Nokia n810 which Sprint will launch on the Xohm network

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The Olympics are over, and it’s time for a final medal count. No, we’re not talking about Michael Phelps here, nor about the fact that the Chinese got more gold medals than everyone else. Instead, we’re gonna take one last look at where people went to watch the Olympics online.

First the good news for NBC: NBCOlympics.com served a total of 75.5 million streams during the games despite all the uproar about Silverlight, tape delays and a bad UI. The site clocked a total of 9.9 million hours of online video coverage. That’s impressive, even if NBC’s online video advertising revenue wasn’t, but there are plenty of other success stories all around the globe.

The BBC also had some major success with its web-based offering, serving almost 40 million streams until late last week, according to the BBC Internet blog. It had almost 200,000 concurrent viewers watching a total of 6.5 million hours of Olympic coverage - and those figures don’t even include the competitions held the final weekend, nor the closing ceremony. The BBC hasn’t published any numbers for its iPlayer yet either, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the video platform saw its traffic triple during the games. The broadcaster only served 2.5 million streams during the games in Athens four years ago.

Other European countries saw large numbers of online viewers as well. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) estimates that a total of 18 million viewers tuned into streams from the games, and its member networks served a total of 180 million streams online. The BBC is a member of the EBU, which means that the Brits caused almost a fourth of all of Europe’s Olympic video streams.

China’s state television network CCTV saw even bigger numbers online. The network told the New York Times that more than 100 million people accessed Olympic video streams on its web site.

But CCTV’s site wasn’t the only way to watch the Olympics in China. The network also sub-licensed the online rights to P2P TV platforms like PPLive. The company told us that a total of 5.5 million viewers used its client to watch the opening ceremony, with 1.6 million concurrent users tuning in during the ceremony itself.

PPLive’s daily concurrent viewers during the Olympics. Image courtesy of PPLive.

PPLive saw similarly high numbers during the rest of the games, with daily peak concurrent viewers anywhere between 210,000 and 500,000 during regular competition days, and climbing up to 820,000 viewers for the closing ceremony.

Finally, the pirates didn’t do too shabby, either. The most popular torrent of the opening ceremony still remains in the top 10 of sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, with Mininova alone clocking nearly 600,000 downloads for a collection of files that totals about five gigabytes.

Downloaders of the opening ceremony torrent by country. Source: Wiredset.com.

This particular torrent had almost 100,000 seeders at one point, according to market research company Wiredset. Also interesting: The vast majority of downloaders are from China, with the U.S. only accounting for eight percent of its downloads.

A California district court concluded today that Veoh is not liable for infringing content uploaded to its site, settling one of the first lawsuits filed against a video sharing site two years ago.

“The record presented demonstrates that, far from encouraging copyright infringement, Veoh has a strong DMCA policy, takes active steps to limit incidents of infringement on its website, and works diligently to keep unauthorized works off its website,” the opinion read.

For those who don’t recall the particulars of the Io v. Veoh lawsuit, let’s briefly review: Io Group, a distributor of adult films, discovered its copyrighted works on Veoh.com in June 2006 and, without requesting the videos be taken down from Veoh, summarily filed suit. Coincidentally, Veoh had already decided to discontinue publishing adult content, and by the time the lawsuit was filed the videos had already been deleted.

The lawsuit went forward anyway. Veoh claimed DMCA safe harbor protection and Io Group disputed that claim, alleging that Veoh didn’t implement its repeat copyright infringer policy in a reasonable manner and thus wasn’t adhering to one of the DMCA’s safe harbor stipulations. Veoh replied with evidence: 1,096 user accounts deleted for repeat copyright infringement, plus records of responding to copyright complaints.

Io responded by arguing that since Veoh can’t track deleted users who create new aliases, Veoh’s repeat infringer policy is useless. Here the decision recounts some unintentional comedy: “Io points out that its vice president, Keith Ruoff, was able to obtain a new Veoh account using the pseudonym ‘FauxUser99′ and the email address ‘FauxUser99@yahoo.com — an address which he acquired from Yahoo using the pseudonym ‘John Doe.’”

What Io Group failed to suss, though, was that the DMCA doesn’t require perfect defenses against copyright infringers. Rather, the DMCA requires that service providers make, essentially, a good-will effort to dissuade and delete infringing material. Plus, Io Group only raised the possibility that a repeat infringer might upload copyrighted material, but never provided evidence that such infringement occurred. Oops.

In its conclusion, the court was quick to distance itself from any suggestion that its decision could be applied to all service provider infringement cases. “The decision rendered here is confined to the particular combination of facts in this case and is not intended to push the boundaries of safe harbor so wide that less than scrupulous service providers may claim its protection.”

It’s about time. Last Spring, Nintendo launched WiiWare, a downloadable game service on the Wii, but I haven’t been all that impressed by the scant titles they’ve made available since then. This week’s offering is different: Helix, from indie developer Ghostfire Games. In my view it’s the first WiiWare title to truly capitalize on the game console’s unique functionality and diverse audience. More crucial, it’s WiiWare’s first music/rhythm game, an entry in the seemingly unstoppable genre which accounts for 32 percent of the industry’s growth so far this year.

Plus, it’s pretty freaking fun.

Think Dance Dance Revolution, but for the upper body. Holding two Wii remotes in either hand, you imitate an on-screen robot in a fast routine of arm swinging, swaying, and waving your hands in the air like you just don’t care. As with DDR and all the many games it’s spawned, you need to time your movements to synch up with the glowing symbols that fly across the screen.

All this is accompanied by fairly decent electronica dance music, though Helix is too frenetic and choppy to feel like dancing. St