Virtual theft results in real-life arrest

A Dutch teenager has been arrested and five others have been questioned for allegedly stealing $5800 worth of virtual furniture from virtual rooms in the Habbo Hotel.

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YouTube HD Coming Soon

Speaking at the NewTeeVee conference yesterday, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen confirmed that YouTube was testing HD video but qualified the statement by stating that YouTube is primarily focused on providing content to everyone, which doesn’t necessarily facilitate a HD product.Chen spoke on the difficulties on providing a watchable HD product to many, including buffering times that don’t drive viewers away. Chen told CNet that the first HD content on YouTube should be available within 3 months.

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Google: Half-trillion dollar company by 2010?

Google’s (GOOG) stock has taken a hit in the past week along with other hot momentum stocks in the wake of renewed credit fears on Wall Street. But even though shares have fallen nearly 10 percent since Google hit a new all-time closing high of $741.79 on November 6, investors can’t be too upset.

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Taboola Lands $1.5 Million, Powers Video Discovery

Search has been one of the most powerful tools on the internet, but its next of kin “discovery” is coming up fast. Many new sites are serving up recommendations alongside search to help visitors discover new content they didn’t even know they wanted. But implementing a discovery engine yourself can take time and money away from your core product. Isral-based Taboola will solve that rather complex problem, for video sites at least.

Taboola’s made integrating their system a breeze. All it takes is a single javascript tag added to your player’s code for them to start recommending videos in your site’s player (or ads, as seen right). You can currently see their service live on 5min. Taboola says that 5min has seen a 23% increase in watched videos and 53% increase in session length.

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Facebook application lets you apply to college

Apparently, you can do more with a Facebook application than throw sheep at your friends; this one claims to actually help you research and apply to universities.

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Get ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware absolutely free (today only)

If you hurry, you can get Check Point Software's $29.95 anti-spyware utility (Windows 2000/XP) for nothing more than the cost of a download.

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Yahoo! Says the Future Will be Modeled on Facebook

The future of both email and start pages is in social networking, according to Yahoo, but what's really at issue here are two concepts that Yahoo execs didn't name explicitly, but which will be familiar to most of the readers here. RSS and Attention Data.

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Google-DoubleClick Deal Delayed in Europe

Google’s big move into display advertising is going to be delayed, maybe until April, if it gets approved at all. The European Commission is holding up Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick on antitrust concerns, fearing that Google’s current dominance of search advertising, combined with DoubleClick’s leading position in display advertising will create an unstoppable force.

Truth be told, that is precisely what Google is hoping for, although it must say the exact opposite to try to get the deal past regulators. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is crying that all of his rivals’ advertising deals (Microsoft-aQuantive, Yahoo-Right Media/BlueLithium, AOL-Tacoda/Quigo) have already been approved or face no similar scrutiny. But that misses the whole point of an antitrust review: to prevent the concentration of too much market power in any one company.

Those other deals don’t threaten to cement any one company’s market dominance, as the DoubleClick deal arguably does. (This must be the only time Steve Balmer is tickled that Google is being treated like the new Microsoft). There are also related privacy concerns, as tracking consumers across sites with ad cookies becomes the industry norm, but that is beyond the official purview of the European Commission.

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission has yet to approve the deal as well. But historically, it has been the European Commission that has always been tougher in approving big mergers because it doesn’t have as much enforcement teeth after a deal is already consummated. Its biggest influence (in terms of being able to squash a deal) is always at the initial approval stage, when it has to basically guess what the future may hold. In a sense, it is a futile exercise.

While search and display advertising may make up the bulk of online advertising today (40 percent and 22 percent, respectively, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau), who is to say that social ads or some other as-yet-to-be invented form of digital advertising won’t sweep the world and make the DoubleClick deal irrelevant? In all likelihood, the deal will go through with the European Commission demanding a set of tough, but ultimately misguided, concessions.

Are there concessions it should demand that would make sense and promote a more competitive digital advertising market? Or should it just stop holding Google back and let the market decide who to reward and who to punish? Comments are open.

By: Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch

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Miro Media Player version 1.0 Released

Version 1.0 of the open-source video player Miro was released earlier today. The non-profit company behind Miro has billed its new product not only as a Joost competitor but a purer one at that.

You can check out all of Miro’s perceived advantages here, but to sum them up: Miro is open-sourced, DRM-free, friendly to all content creators, connected to all the popular video sharing sites like YouTube and blip.tv, high definition, full of content, and BitTorrent-enabled.

Miro functions more like iTunes and is a good way to download batches of interesting videos from the internet regardless of whether they are professionally-produced or user-generated. Content must be downloaded via HTTP or BitTorrent, not streamed (although Miro can convert streams into downloads from sites like YouTube, blip.tv, and DailyMotion). You can download particular shows or just tell it to give you videos from particular categories (comedy, news, technology, etc.). Since videos must be downloaded, playback is not instant; but the videos load pretty quickly so it’s not a huge drawback.

Miro will soon be available for co-branding so that content creators can create their own versions of the player with pre-configured channels filled with their own content.

See a comparison of Miro and Joost here

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Inbox 2.0

Saul Hansell at the The New York Times is reporting that both Yahoo and Google are planning to use their email services as the core of their social networking strategy over time.

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