The Deal – iPhone…iPhone…iPhone…and more iPhone news…

As the June 29^th iPhone rollout date fast approaches, we are doing our part in keeping our listeners and attendant Mac Smackers totally up to date on the latest iPhone buzz and news.

First, and foremost, Apple Inc. CEO, Steve Jobs, announced today during his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference being held in San Francisco, that the iPhone will support third party applications built on Web 2.0 technologies. Since the iPhone was originally announced in January of this year, third-party application compatibility was undeniably an issue of contention. This announcement eases many of the fears voiced by developers, while keeping the security of the iPhone intact.

While applications built using Web 2.0 technology like AJAX will run through the device's Safari web browser, Jobs promised that they will look and behave exactly like the applications built-in to the device. Because the applications will actually be residing on the developer's web server, there will also be the added advantage of not having to manually update them when a new version is released.

Good news for developers, everywhere.

Updates to Apple’s OS X, iPhone app development and Safari for Windows may be the most talked-about introductions from Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote address, but updates to Mac’s OS X Leopard Server include significant features for podcasters.

According to Apple, Leopard Server is the most crucial improvement to the server operating system since Mac OS X Server was launched. It introduces:

• wiki server - making it easy to connect groups over a shared intranet;
• Podcast Producer - a way to automatically produce and publish podcasts to iTunes or a blog;
• Spotlight Server - to quickly find content stored on other servers; and
• iCal Server - based on the CalDAV open standard that works with Leopard’s new iCal application.

Podcast Producer is an end-to-end solution for encoding, publishing, and distributing podcasts. Podcast Producer is designed to simplify the process of recording content, encoding, and publishing podcasts for playback in iTunes and on iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV.

The combination of Podcast Producer and Leopard’s Podcast Capture app create a client-server system for publishing podcasts. The new podcasting features look like they will be a powerful option for producing podcasts, especially for organizations primarily targeting the iPod/iTunes platform.

The introduction of these new apps and improvements to Apple’s mobile platform should go a long way toward boosting iPhone sales, a strategy the company is certainly counting on without a doubt.

The Flop - Web Video Makes Giant Leap with Content Delivery Firm's IPO

Limelight Networks' well-received public offering has put a spotlight on a fast-growing sector of the Internet called content delivery networks (CDN).

The Tempe, Arizona-based network began selling shares in it’s new IPO this past Friday at $15 and topped 24 before settling back to finish the day at 22.18, up 48%. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley initially planned to sell shares at $10 to $12.

"There's a big appetite for IPOs, and underlying that is a big appetite for growth stocks," said Rob Sanderson, analyst at American Technology Research.

It was a bit bumpier ride on Monday: The stock fell nearly 9% to close at 20.25, then rose nearly 3% in after-hours trading.

The buzz has helped lift shares of other CDN companies like Akamai, VeriSign, Internap Network Services, and Level 3 Communications.

Limelight is seen as a growth stock -- as many tech stocks were before the dot-com collapse of 2000 -- thanks to a surge in video streams on the Web. Sales have grown at triple-digit rates.

All this activity in the CDN space can be attributed to the YouTube effect. According to research firm eMarketer, more than 60% of Internet users watch videos online and about 80% are expected to do so by the end of 2010. In addition to an explosion in video-sharing sites such as Google-owned YouTube, Hollywood studios and TV networks are pushing content onto the Web at a dizzying pace.

Streaming video is the Internet's Achilles heel. Web video is growing at a 25% compound annual rate and on track to continue at that rate through 2010, said Phil Kaplan, chief strategy officer at Internap.

Video streams, which contain much more information than most Web pages and e-mail, can absolutely overwhelm networks. That's where content delivery networks come in.

CDNs are primed for speed, providing a high-quality experience for video, music, games, software and social networks such as MySpace.

As Limelight's IPO prospectus puts it, when data packets traversing the Web are dropped or delayed during the delivery of rich media content, users notice. The congestions cause songs to skip, videos to freeze and downloads to slow.

On the Web, businesses want 100% content delivery all the time, said Jim DeBlasio, Internap's chief executive. "Ninety-five percent won't cut it," he said.

In response, businesses with a heavy Web presence have invested heavily to build their own infrastructure of servers, storage and network components. Increasingly, though, they are turning that work over to CDNs.

"The content explosion is getting bigger and requires innovative solutions to deliver that cost effectively," said Erik Klinker, chief technology offer at BitTorrent, which created the namesake file-sharing standard.

Limelight's public offering is a "tremendous validation" of CDN providers, which are working to lower the cost and boost the quality of content delivery, Klinker said.

"The distribution costs are really constraining some innovative business models," he said.

Limelight's IPO has raised $240 million thus far, and will net the company some $170 million. It plans to use the money to fund capital spending and pay off $24 million in debt. Limelight has about 800 customers, including MSNBC, Viacom, ABC, MySpace, Facebook, Sony, and Microsoft.

The Turn – Sony Gaming Phone Not Ready But They File Patent Anyway

Sony Ericsson has filed a U.S. patent application for a mobile device with video game features, but said on Monday it is not actually ready to launch a phone based on its PlayStation Portable (PSP) video game brand.

Sony Ericsson, a venture of Sony Corp. and Ericsson, filed a patent application dated May 31 of this year with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office related to a mobile device with gaming features and functionality that was originally developed by Japanese employees.

The fourth-biggest cell phone maker did not rule out the development of a device combining its phone technology with Sony's portable video game technology, but said it was not ready to announce any products.

"We're continually evaluating other propositions but they have to be credible propositions. We're not interested in sticking parts on phones that destroy the brand equity that's been built up by Sony," Sony Ericsson spokeswoman Merran Wrigley said by phone on Monday.

The comments came after newspaper and blog reports speculating that Sony Ericsson would launch a phone based on Sony's popular PSP handheld gaming device.

Patent drawings released from last year show a device that looks something very much like a PSP (or PlayStation Portable device) retooled to work as a mobile phone.  The screen on the candy bar style phone can flip 90 degrees to make it look more like a slim PDA.  Or, the phone can be turned horizontally to have a landscape mode screen orientation and a control set much like a handheld gaming device

Sony Ericsson has succeeded in selling music phones and camera phones that capitalize on its well-known Walkman music player brand and its Cyber-Shot digital camera brand. But this could potentially be a very risky move for Sony. This is a company that's already facing setbacks from a rocky start with the PS3.  Not to mention that Nokia lost millions of dollars on its ambitious N-Gage gaming phone project. 

A similar handset from Samsung never even made it to the states, in spite of ambitious plans to do so.  The mobile gaming market as a whole is also still struggling to achieve universal standards, with different programming languages and unclear system specifications causing confusion for consumers.

However, Ms. Wrigley said the company did not release these products until it was at a point where it felt customers did not have to compromise on either the phone or the media capability.

There has been no word, of late, from Sony's gaming division about a new PSP, much less one with a phone built in, a U.S. spokesman for Sony Computer Entertainment told Reuters. Sony has made improvements to the PSP, which made its debut in December 2004, using software, or "firmware," upgrades.

Sony Ericsson plans to unveil products featuring music and imaging capabilities rather than gaming features at an event scheduled to take place in Berlin on June 14, Ms. Wrigley said.

The announcement comes two weeks before Apple Inc. launches sales of its widely anticipated music-playing iPhone in the United States on June 29. Yep…sounds right. The iPhone buzz is clearly worrying the slew of competitors who stand to lose hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of customer to Apple’s marketing onslaught of it’s hottest product rollout since the iPod.

Stay tuned…it’s going to be a hot, restless summer in the tech biz.

The River – YouTube to Test Video ID Tech with Disney and Time Warner

Alright, kiddies, how about some tech news NOT related to the iPhone.

The 999 pound gorilla in the video services space, YouTube, will soon test a new video identification technology in conjunction with two of the world's largest media companies, Walt Disney Co  and Time Warner Inc.

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will aid content owners such as movie and TV studios in identifying videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission. This from YouTube’s legal, marketing and strategy executives from an interview done on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

YouTube has come under fiery scrutiny from some traditional media companies, who say the giant video service has dragged its heels in offering reliable ways to identify video clips uploaded by regular users without permission.

MTV Networks-owner Viacom Inc. sued Google and YouTube for over $1 billion in March, charging the company with "massive intentional copyright infringement" after demanding the removal of clips of its popular shows "Colbert Report" and "Daily Show," hosted by comedian Jon Stewart.

Originally, YouTube said last year such tools would be made available to test by the end of 2006. But executives have stepped back from that pronouncement, now saying the reliable identification of content was a complex task that required it to develop its own technology tools.

Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name the other parties. "There are a couple. There are more that we can't talk about right now," Maxcy said.

YouTube has also been testing technology to help identify the audio tracks of video clips with major record labels using technology provided by privately held Audible Magic as early as the first two months of 2007, the company said.

These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year, YouTube executives said on Monday.

"It's typically not something we talk about," Maxcy said, adding, however: "We wanted to clear the air."

Well, that’s the lay of the cards for Monday, June 11^th. We’ll be back tomorrow with another show. Until then, have a great tech day!