They’re calling the project the Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG) and are building plans for a grid of ground stations and communications satellites that would be independent of governments world wide. Long-term, if the initial project succeeds, they’d like to further prove the model that governments aren’t the only answer by staging the first moon landing since the Apollo missions.

The Challenges

Beyond the obvious challenge of funding, the technological feats here would be huge. So far, hobbyists and amateurs have only managed to put low-orbit satellites into space for short periods and tracking has proved nearly impossible without a large budget to afford complex and costly hardware.

Most of these attempts have been made with balloons with only a few successful rocket attempts having been made. Most amateur rockets that do make space are not capable of carrying a payload as large as a usable communications satellite.

Of course, none of this means that HGG would have to launch their satellites themselves. Or even make the satellites to be launched. All could be purchased from professionals already in the game, many of which are private and not government.

That goes back to funding. A satellite and launch can cost in the millions. Nick Farr, the hacker-activist (not the same as a ‘hactivist’) behind the HGG project, has only just begun asking for donations in August. So the project is still in its infancy.

The Ground Network Will Be Toughest

The toughest part of the project will be the ground network. Since virtually all land on the earth is claimed by one or another government, any buildings or equipment used to track and communicate with satellites in orbit would be subject to their laws (and enforcement).

Conceivably, a looser network of activists without a solid location could accomplish this in an underground fashion, but long-term, this is not likely to be a solution.

To counter this problem, the HGG project is proposing a ‘grid’ of small stations – something that could be in a person’s home, backyard, or even stashed on an abandoned property – that would act as a sort of reverse GPS. Rather than using a satellite to track geo-locations, the grid would use geolocation systems to track satellites. If the sites are fixed and in precisely-known locations, this would be easy and would not require expensive hardware.

HGG Overall

The total plan is ambitious, interesting, and definitely fun to speculate about. Would it make reality? That depends entirely on the will of those who are on-board with the project. Larger things have been accomplished by dedicated groups before. There’s no reason this one should be any different.

No related posts.

Amazon proudly announced they sold over 4 million Kindle devices during the Holiday shopping season (late November through December). Over a million Kindles a week were purchased while e-book sales jumped 175% over last year.

More interesting information comes out of these figures. It’s not just about Amazon success. In fact, Amazon is suspected to have been losing money on every Kindle Fire sale (that can be read more than one way), but the huge increase in e-book purchases may have made up for that.

Kindle Sales Figures

The big news, from Amazon’s perspective, was in Kindle device sales. All three Kindle family products (Fire, Touch, and standard Kindle) held the top 3 spots on Amazon’s bestsellers list for the entire month of holiday shopping. The Fire was the most wished for and gifted product on the site this season as well.

Overseas, it was the top selling product in the UK, France, Spain and Italy.

Further, Amazon was prepared and had no back order issues this year and actually outpaced Apple’s iPad in sales as well.

E-Book Winners and Losers

With e-book sales up over 175% from last year, many authors and publishers made out very well this season. Interestingly, the number one and number four best selling electronic books this year were both self-published by the author independent of publishers via Kindle Direct Publishing. That’s an amazing statistic and shows something important: the old paradigm of publishing houses is falling.

E-books as gifts followed the sales trends, with year-on-year numbers matching sales growth. Christmas Day was the largest day ever for Kindle book downloads, which makes obvious sense.

The losers? Big publishing houses. Most of them count on hard-copy book sales during the holiday season and their sales figures this year were not so good. They remained relatively constant with little growth. Amazon reported that more e-books than hardcover books were sold during December and self-reported numbers from publishing houses seem to corroborate this with last year seeing more e-books sold than hard copies, as of February 2011.

Third-party Amazon.com Sales

Third-party sellers, now a big part of Amazon.com, also made out well this year. Third-party sellers experienced record holiday growth with 44% more $5,000+ sellers on Amazon than the year before. This makes sense, given the new, expanded, and easier-to-use seller platform Amazon rolled out and has been advertising heavily.

Bestseller Of All?

The best seller of all, according to Amazon numbers, was Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. By a landslide. It was the most-browsed, most bought, and most gifted thing on Amazon ever.

Related posts:

1. The Secret Behind the Nook and Kindle Success Machines
2. 5 Ways iTunes Has Changed Music
3. Electronic Arts Gets It, Is Going Digital

What’s enlightening is that Firefox came out last – even behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which many would assume Google would target first. Instead, the target is Mozilla, Google’s on-again, off-again friend. The study itself is not exactly what I would describe as ‘in depth’ or ‘telling’ in its findings either, since it puts a lot of weight on emerging technologies that may or may not be enhancing our security while browsing the Web.

Read the rest of this story on the BFM Blog

Related posts:

1. Google Ditches QR Codes – Should You?
2. 4 of My Favourite Google Tools
3. Google Takes Speech Recognition to the Next Level

Who then owns the profile?

A lawsuit happening in a U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania is asking just that question.

The Back Story

Before we look at the suit itself, let’s look at the story behind it. A startup called Edcomm was purchased by another company, Sawabeh. Shortly after the buyout, the founders of Edcomm were fired. This quickly lead to a lot of lawsuits.

The lawsuit dealing with a social media account specifically involves Dr. Linda Eagle, PhD. Other allegations include breaches of contract and so forth. It seems that there may have been an agreement with Sawabeh that Edcomm would remain autonomous and retain its corporate officers (namly Dr. Eagle and two others).

The social media account in question, though, is Dr. Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

The Allegations

Both sides have different stories. Sawabeh says that it was Edcomm policy to create and maintain, at their own expense, social media accounts on behalf of their employees – specifically corporate staff and sales. Eagle says the opposite is true and that the account is hers.

The other founders involved in this case also had LinkedIn accounts, but are not, apparently, being included in this case because neither of their accounts were accessible by Edcomm employees when the company terminated them. Eagle’s however, was.

Sawabeh alleges that when Eagle left, she continued to use her LinkedIn account (which they claim as theirs) and that she took other items associated with it (a phone number she transferred to another phone, etc). Again, Dr. Eagle denies these claims and says the phone number was hers as was the laptop they say she took.

What’s really at stake here are the contacts made and networking achieved through Eagle’s LinkedIn account.

Social Contacts and Ownership

The real issue, as far as the LinkedIn account is concerned, are the contacts it has. When Eagle left, the company immediately changed her profile to hold the name of another employee and their photograph. This was what started the lawsuit. The company claimed ownership of the account, but was not claiming ownership over Eagle’s likeness or profile, just her contacts list, it appears.

That says something. The issue isn’t whether or not someone owns their LinkedIn profile, but whether or not they own the networking contacts that can be made through it. In a more broad sense, this would apply to all business-centered social media accounts.

So what do you think? Should a company be able to own the contacts lists their employees have on their social media accounts if those accounts are maintained at company expense? How far does this reach? If you are accessing your social media from work and even contacting business clients through them, you are in many ways using corporate resources for those accounts. Doesn’t that mean they have some kind of ownership interest in them? Or not?

These are hard questions, but it’s obvious that they’re going to become more and more common with the rise of social media in our daily personal and business lives.

Technorati Tags: employment, marketing, social media

Related posts:

1. Social Media Yields New Customers For Small Businesses
2. Social Media in Small Business – Making the Most of It
3. The use of social media tactics for B2B

Related posts:

1. SEO Predictions for 2010 – How Much Will Change for You?
2. Have you tried this local social media app?
3. Email and Social Marketing Top Budgets

Who’s at risk?

Anyone who owns a dot com, net, or org website is potentially at risk. The way ICE seizures work is simple: they go after the domain itself, not the website. The domain is a piece of property under law and ‘privacy’ concerns do not affect it, since the domain is not the website or its contents. So ‘JamesBurchill.com’ is not the same as the website you view when you go there.

So seizing the domain is relatively easy and only has one guardian: the registrar who holds the domain registration. They show a court order and take control of the domain. They then redirect it to a new server (change the domain name services, DNS) and display their seizure logo.

Anyone with a domain that can be accessed in the U.S. and is subject to U.S. copyright law (goes through Network Solutions) can potentially be seized in this way.

How this will be used.

How would SOPA and PROTECT IP be used then? We have current examples under the way ICE now handles these seizures, which would be expanded under both of these new pieces of legislation in the U.S. House and Senate.

An example is a site called Dajaz1.com, which is a blog about hip-hop music. It was one of the most well-known and heavily trafficked blogs in the genre and had very high rankings. So much so that artists and even record labels would approach it as they would any print media outlet and even pre-release some special tracks and cuts to the site to help promote artists and album releases.

It was that latter that started all of this. A new investigator at ICE saw the song posts and immediately figured them for piracy, since the songs were available on albums that could be purchased from record labels. The young attorney went to RIAA with the information and RIAA, not knowing the details (and not caring to ask), said the site was obviously in violation.

There’s your first clue. The investigator was going to the people who’ve got the most to gain from seizures of this sort – the Record Labels’ most ardent defender and anti-digital group, RIAA.

So the attorney filed with the court to seize the domain and it went through. ICE then took Dajaz1.com off the Internet.

An attorney representing the website’s owners contacted ICE and was told it was seized for piracy and that paperwork for forfeiture would be filed in court within 60 days. After 60 days passed, the attorney contacted them again and was told that the judge had granted ICE an extension. The attorney asked for copies of that and verification and was told that it could not be given because it was under seal. No reason for a court-ordered seal (or proof of such) was given. For over a year, the government continued to claim that extensions, under seal, had been given. To this day, no one knows if that’s the truth or if it was just a lie.

Meanwhile, government spokespeople for ICE claimed that no one was contesting the seizures, giving the impression that they were legitimate (other sites other than Dajaz1.com were seized as well). This was an outright lie.

Finally, after the heat had died in the media over the seizures and things moved on to other subjects, ICE quietly gave the domains back to their owners without any apologies or explanations and slunk away.

For over a year – about 14 months – the domains were seized and under the control of ICE. During that time, they lost all ranking, most of their readerships, and were basically destroyed as assets. All for reasons unknown. Except one thing: it’s become obvious that someone at ICE, namely the attorney who filed the case originally, made a big mistake. It’s plausible that this person’s superiors saw this and, afraid of the implications were they to admit an error of this scale, instead tried to bury it.

Obviously, this can only be guessed at since nothing official has come out of ICE or Justice.

But it does show what can happen.

An extreme case? Possibly, but extremes have a funny way of becoming the norm after they’ve happened a few times. Under SOPA and PROTECT IP, these extremes could become much easier.

Related posts:

1. SOPA, RIAA, ICE and You (Part 1)
2. Burlington Chamber of Commerce: Why It Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
3. Think Backwards

The Internet is abuzz with talk of ‘SOPA’ and ‘PROTECT IP’ and how these laws could/will/can’t/won’t hurt the Internet. Like anything in politics, it’s all in who you ask. In this case, the legislation being considered is actually secondary. Should they pass, their ramifications are already known. That’s a rare thing in politics.

SOPA? PROTECT IP? Huh?

These are two pieces of legislation being considered in the United States Congress. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives (HR 3261) that is ostensibly to strengthen piracy laws and allow for better handling of copyrights in the new, digital, online world.

The Protecting Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property (PROTECT) Act of 2011. This is the U.S. Senate’s version of the SOPA bill, but being the Senate, they came up with a more pronounced acronym.

Both of these bills are hotly debated and have supporters and detractors just like any other galvanizing piece of legislation. They both give new powers to the U.S. Justice Department for combating online piracy. It’s those new powers that are the crux of most argument.

Why we already know the outcome.

This time around, we do not have to make guesses as to what SOPA and PROTECT IP would do were they to become law in the U.S. There is already a team of people in the Justice Department whose job revolves around internet piracy.

In response to heavy lobbying by the Recording Industry and Artists Association (RIAA), Justice created a task force inside the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE) specifically to target online piracy. ICE has now notoriously gone after alleged pirate websites which are said to be offering illegal downloads and access to copyright protected content.

ICE does this, now famously, through domain seizures. They go to the site’s registrar with a court order (usually a temporary seizure order, which allows them to take the domain for 60 days) and then put up a wall with a now-famous graphic stating that the site has been seized under suspicion of piracy.

The red-bordered graphic has become a calling card on political activist sites everywhere, touting the over-reaching arm of government. Within 60 days of seizure, the government can then go to forfeiture proceedings, which are in civil court. These proceedings give the site’s owner 35 days to file to get their site back, at which point it goes into court – a costly process for the site owner. If the government can show due cause for the forfeiture, the judge allows the site to remain in their hands. Otherwise, it is handed back to its original owner, who now is likely out many thousands of dollars in legal fees. In the mean time, the value of the site has plummeted to nearly nothing because it’s been seized and shown with a big ‘thieves own this site’ banner for months.

In the next part of this two-part series, I’ll show you how it is that we already know what will happen should SOPA and PROTECT IP become law in the U.S. It will affect Canadians and much of the Internet itself, for that matter – anyone with a dot com, net or org site is potentially a part of this, no matter where you live.

Related posts:

1. Burlington Chamber of Commerce: Why It Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy
2. Google’s Switch to Encrypted Search and What It Means for SEO Marketing

=== Spotify’s Platform

At a press event in Manhattan, Spotify revealed its new direction. The company is opening its popular freemium app to developers through an application programming interface (API). This will let developers create apps that can work inside Spotify in much the same way games and plug-ins work on Facebook or your Firefox browser.

The apps will be natively in HTML5 and ‘live’ inside Spotify so that no special installation other than asking Spotify to activate them is necessary. This means no downloads and that Spotify will retain control over privacy concerns.

At launch for this new way of doing things, Spotify showed off apps from Rolling Stone Magazine, Last.fm, TuneWiki, The Guardian, and more. These apps allow Spotify to ‘upgrade’ itself for users without having to develop the changes themselves. They also mean that users have more control over their Spotify client, since you can choose which to install and which to leave off.

The Rolling Stone app, for instance, links to magazine content related to the band or artist you’re listening to. The Last.fm app lets you stream your Spotify playlists to Last.fm so your friends can listen in radio-style and the TuneWiki app links to artist and song information from the popular music wiki.

All of this means Spotify is moving to the next level and positioning itself to become a first choice for music online.

=== Senzari to Dethrone Pandora

If you’re into less active music listening and prefer to listen radio-style – just choose a genre (or genres) and listen to whatever comes up – then you’re probably a Pandora streamer. The service, however, is limited with less than a million titles and is available only in the U.S. and Canada.

Senzari is a startup that just received $2 million in funding and has already secured webcasting privileges in the U.S., Brazil and Spain. This means it can stream nearly any radio-edit song available from any distributor, making its catalog huge.

It integrates heavily with Facebook, so you can not only share with your FB friends, but it also scours your ‘likes’ to see which bands you like, tailoring content on your listening channel to your preferences. You can also listen in on other user’s public ‘stations’ to discover new music or listen with friends.

Senzari is currently in private beta in the U.S. and Brazil and plans to open beta in Spain this month.

It definitely has what’s needed to supplant Pandora as the Internet radio option of choice.

Technorati Tags: online music

Related posts:

1. 5 Ways iTunes Has Changed Music
2. The times they are a changing
3. Online Publishers and Content Providers Can Consolidate With Google

So how has iTunes fundamentally changed the industry and are those changes good or bad?

1 Singles Reign Again

In the days of radio, singles were the name of the game. Record promoters used a single off an artist’s album to sell the album to consumers. In the beginning, this was mostly a good thing since most albums were good stuff. Eventually, however, this gave rise to the one-hit-wonder bands that made one great radio-ready song and had 12 other worthless tracks to go with it. Consumers got tired of buying a full album at full price just to get one song in their library.

Although singles on record, tape, and eventually CD might have changed that a little, iTunes changed it a lot. Now, more singles than full albums are sold and the market shows no signs of letting up on this trend.

2 Album Lengths and Content

To go with the singles changes, albums have fundamentally changed as well. Song lengths are no longer limited to the 4-minute radio blurb as a built-in requirement to get air time. Producers are seeing these trends and re-formatting albums to match. Today, most albums have 3 or 4 radio-edit songs at the front followed by the planned first hit single at centre and then longer or less marketable songs towards the end of the album.

Many consumers are becoming song-savvy and are previewing albums on iTunes and Amazon. Numbers show that most of them will listen to the first four or five song previews before purchasing the whole album. With the price point as it is, consumers believe that if only one or two songs are good, they’ll just buy the singles, but if several are good, it’s cheaper to buy the whole album at once. Producers see this and are therefore pushing albums as a single unit by organizing the songs most likely to be played as previews at the front. By the time the potential consumer hits the current radio single, they will be sold on buying the entire album instead of singles.

3 Brick & Mortar No More

The old brick music store and the music store as a hub of the shopping centre are nearly gone. New technology making for instant downloads and easier marketing and distribution have meant fewer and fewer physical sales of albums. In fact, most physical sales are now through online outlets such as Amazon rather than in tangible stores.

4 Portable Listening Is In Vogue (Again)

After a huge amount of popularity in the 80s and 90s, portable music players and listening seemed to die off. The iPod changed that a little bit, but not until the popular uprising of electronic formats, spearheaded by iTunes, did it take off once again. Recent years have seen many portable devices including music playing as an expected feature. Phones, tablets, and even cars are now able to play portable electronic music formats as part of their built-in repertoire.

5 Big Labels Losing Sales – The Rise of the Indies Commences

Big record labels are increasingly seeing lower and lower revenues as a failure to keep up with the new trends and bad public relations from lawsuits take their toll. Many artists are turning to independent or even self-promoted labels to distribute their wares, made much easier and cheaper thanks to the Internet. A band or small label can easily distribute through iTunes, Amazon, or even Facebook and MySpace.

Artists are turning to socially-promoted festivals (‘Festy’s') as a way to both promote themselves and quickly (and cheaply) schedule live performances. While physical album sales can happen at these events, they are usually used to promote websites or other means of getting electronic downloads of the album instead.

The iTunes revolution has fundamentally changed how music happens in our daily lives.

It’s a great thing to witness

Related posts:

1. Online Music Changing (Again)
2. How to Protect Your Privacy on Facebook

Luxemburg-based Manwin and Digital Playground, two of the largest porn producers online, between them owning many of the most well-known porn hubs on the Internet, are contending that ICANN, through ICM, is price-gouging and profiteering on the .XXX domain. They want an injunction to stop the top level domain and require its re-opening with competition and reasonable price constraints.

=== The Lawsuits Allegations

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of California on November 16 and accuses ICANN and ICM Registry of engaging in ‘monopolistic conduct, price gouging, and anti-competitive and unfair practices.’ The basis of the suit is the allegation that ICM used coercive tactics and promises of millions in fees if it were made sole registrar of the XXX domains.

According to Manwin and Digital Playground, when ICANN approved the dot XXX TLD earlier this year, it gave monopoly to the domain to ICM (a for-profit registrar) and allowed ICM to proceed with price gouging. Many thousands in fees were collected for single domains on the new TLD, which is public knowledge, but the way those fees were charged is, according to the lawsuit, anti-competitive.

In addition, some of the domains expected to fetch higher values were withheld from even this semi-public pre-registration process by ICM and then auctioned to the highest bidder. Many of these, according to documents, were at several hundred thousand dollars. Whether the brand owner of the dot com, net, etc. TLDs was the winner did not matter to ICM. ‘Gay.xxx’ reportedly went for over half a million dollars, for instance, and other variants went for $200,000 and more.

=== What This Means to ICANN

For ICANN this could be a major boondoggle. Giving monopoly to a registrar is not new to the Internet registry, but giving it under such questionable circumstances and with such high profit results is a big potential problem. Through ICANN, all domains are ultimately registered world-wide, but if this lawsuit were to set a new precedent, that monopoly, even by a non-profit, could be questioned.

This would all hinge on what the courts (it’s surely not going to stop at this single lawsuit) decide happened between ICANN and ICM during the registrar selection process. This filing does not make things look good for them, with substantiated allegations of insider dealing and promises of payoff.

The fact that ICM is requiring .XXX domain registrations include signing a waiver that indemnifies them from legal rights and claims as a condition of registration is not going to look good either.

=== What This Suit Could Change

The porn industry, whether you like it or not, is responsible for most of the major innovations on the Web today and through much of its history. Streaming audio, video, embedded media, and many other technologies have porn to thank. This lawsuit could change even more of the Internet as we know it.

On the one hand, it will call into question how ICANN handles registrations and gives power to for-profits that conduct the business of domain ownership. At the very least, even if this suit fails, it will likely have many questioning and ultimately calling for changes to how that process is handled.

On the other hand, if the lawsuit goes through with a big win for the companies suing, then it could fundamentally change domain registration and ownership as we know it. Unlike nearly everything else on the Web, domain registrations are not done in the cloud, but are one of the few things online that are handled in a more centralized way. This could change should this lawsuit win on all fronts.

If that happens.. the face of the Web as we know it will change in a big way. For the better? I guess we’ll have to wait to find out.

Related posts:

1. Think Backwards