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Combined, the new jointly owned media company would own more than two dozen TV networks, including NBC, along with several cable stations, such as USA Network. Comcast already operates some of its own cable networks, such as E!, the Style Network, and G4. The new joint venture would also own NBC Universal studios, plus 10 local NBC TV affiliates in cities such as New York and San Diego.

Comcast, too, is starting to embrace online video, teaming up with media conglomerate Time Warner earlier this year to test a new service offered by Comcast called On Demand Online. The service allows Comcast cable customers to access some of Time Warner’s most popular TV shows from its TNT and TBS networks at no additional charge. Its plan is to provide TV networks and movie studios a secure way to distribute their movies and TV shows to a wider audience via the Internet.

The Wall Street Journal said that talks between Comcast and GE could still fall apart. Comcast is looking to pay as little as it can up-front. And there is an issue about what to do with Vivendi, which has a 20 percent stake in NBC Universal.

Individual TV channels have been putting their own TV content online for consumers to access for some time. This initially troubled cable operators such as Comcast; they saw the free delivery of video content for which they pay a hefty price as a threat to their business.

NBC and News Corp., the owner of Fox, have made a splash with online service Hulu, which offers TV shows and some movies on demand. Other media conglomerates, including CNET News publisher CBS, have made similar moves.

Cable giant Comcast is reportedly in talks to gain a controlling stake in General Electric’s NBC Universal, in a deal that would help shape Comcast’s online-content strategy and help NBC Universal keep pace amid the shifting market.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Comcast is hoping to form a privately held joint venture that would include NBC’s media content. Comcast would control the venture with a 51 percent stake, and GE would own 49 percent of the new company.

This isn’t the first time Comcast has gone looking for a big media company. Five years ago, the company tried to acquire Walt Disney for about $66 billion. In the years since that failed attempt, the media and video distribution landscape has changed dramatically.

Television networks are struggling to keep advertising revenues up, and movie studios are under pressure to prevent digital piracy from eating into their profits. Meanwhile, Comcast, which is facing more competition from phone companies and satellite providers in its TV business, is also trying to figure out how best to use the Internet to deliver video content.

Ooma’s claim to fame is that it sells VoIP phone systems that let you make free domestic U.S. calls and low-priced international calls. To help drive home the point that you don’t have to pay for phone service, Amazon labeled Ooma’s first product, which remains on sale, the Ooma Core VoIP Phone System with No Monthly Phone Service Bills.

You probably don’t remember it, but way back in January, at CES, a little company called Ooma unveiled its next-generation phone system, the Telo, which combines DECT 6.0 cordless-phone technology with Internet-based (VoIP) calling. Well, after nearly 10 months of waiting, the Telo is finally landing in stores and is available for $249.99.

(Credit:
Ooma)

The Ooma Telo costs $249.99 for the hub (right) and $49.99 for the handset, which will be available in November.

Once you shell out the $250 for the Telo, you can make unlimited domestic calls for free, and such features as caller ID and access to online call logs are included at no additional charge. If you want to port your existing number, that will cost you $39.99, but if you want a brand-new number, you don’t have to pay anything.

From a design standpoint, the Telo is sexier-looking than its predecessor and more importantly, improves on the feature set, as well as on the call quality. While you can connect a standard cordless phone to the Telo, in November Ooma will also begin offering its own handsets for the system at $49.99 a pop (up to six Ooma handsets can be added to the system). Oooma reps are also highlighting how you can have calls from your cell phone redirected to the Telo.

We’ll be getting a Telo in for review and we’ll let you know how it performs as soon as we put it through its paces. If it’s as good as it seems, it might be time for this blogger to ditch Vonage, which currently charges a base fee of $24.95 a month for unlimited domestic and international calls to 60 countries, so long as you lock into a one-year contract.

Enhanced Voicemail: Listen to voice mail through the speaker of the Ooma Telo device or forward voice mail and listen to messages on a mobile phone or a computer.
Call Screening and Intercept: Listen through the speaker as callers leave their voice mail. Pick up at anytime to answer or tap a key to send the call away.
Personal and Community Blacklists: Tap into Ooma’s extensive database of telemarketers and phone spammers and have the option of blocking unwanted callers or sending them straight to voice mail.
Multi-Ring: Configure your Ooma system to simultaneously ring or forward a call to a mobile phone.
Three-way Conferencing: Easily talk to two parties at once with easy three-way conference calling.
Personal Number: Choose a second number anywhere in the U.S. and have it ring distinctively so you know who the call is for.
Instant Second Line: Always have an available dial tone even if someone else is using the phone; users can also make or take a second call without missing a beat. (This feature requires an Ooma Telo Handset, which will be available in November.) Naturally, Ooma encourages you to opt in to the Premium package, and is currently offering a free Ooma Telo Handset or free number porting (a $39.99 value) if you sign up for a year. The company also notes that after the first year of ownership, all Ooma Telo users will be charged an annual regulatory recovery fee of $11.75 to “cover taxes, regulatory recovery fees, and other costs.” So eventually going free is going to cost you about a buck a month, but that’s pretty reasonable.

Now, if you’re wondering how Telo makes money, the company does offer a premium service plan. (You’re looking at a freemium/premium business model.) Ooma’s optional Premier costs $9.99 per month and includes the following features:

Anybody excited by the Telo? Let us know what you think.

Further terms of the deal were not disclosed. Los Angeles-based Spot Runner, which helps companies advertise on TV and radio, will integrate Weblistic’s online marketing technology and ad campaign expertise into its services. Spot Runner received $40 million in funding in late 2006.

(Credit:
Spot Runner)

Internet-based ad agency Spot Runner is acquiring Weblistic, which sells online ads to local businesses, in an all-stock transaction.

Picnik, one of my personal favorites for editing photos online launched a new array of advanced editing tools a few hours ago. You can read about some of them from our earlier post, or the official announcement over at the company’s blog. The biggest news is that many of the ones that previously required a paid, premium membership are now available to free users.

I got a chance to talk to Picnik’s CEO Jonathan Sposato about the update, as well as the past and future of the company. The big topic was the looming release of Adobe’s Photoshop Express, something that doesn’t seem to have Sposato and company too worried. “Adobe has a business to protect. Picnik has a business to build,” Sposato said. He also noted that early looks of the product (see coverage) show that there might not be integration with social services people are already using–something Sposato believes critical to Picnik’s adoption, and that has served the company well.

As for competing services encroaching on Picnik’s space, including FotoFlexer, which unveiled its no-fee Pro service last month, Sposato says his company is confident about the current road map and feature release schedule, which is set to trickle down to free users (just like what happened today). “We’ve got more engineers now, and that means we’re able to turn out new features faster than before.”

Looking back, Picnik became the official editor of photos on Flickr in December and has since experienced tremendous growth. The company wouldn’t share its official numbers with us, but noted that Flickr has provided double digit percentages of site growth in addition to the highest ratio of users that give the free service a try and then upgrade to the premium membership. Sposato also noted that Flickr users are almost always uploading their shots back to the service, often replacing the original shot with the edited one–a process that is now reversible with the new history feature similar to the one for files seen over at Box.net.

In a long-awaited milestone for the International Space Station, a Russian Soyuz rocket scheduled for launch early Wednesday will ferry three fresh crew members to the lab complex, boosting its crew size to six for the first time.

Soyuz TMA-15 commander Roman Romanenko (left), Robert Thirsk (center), and Frank De Winne before launch to the International Space Station

(Credit:
RSC Energia)

The Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft, mounted atop the same launch pad used by Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the space age, is scheduled for takeoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:34:49 a.m. EDT.

Soyuz commander Roman Romanenko, son of a Russian cosmonaut, will be strapped into the center seat, flanked by European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne of Belgium and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk, a shuttle veteran.

“I can’t think of three finer gentlemen to help us realize our dream of six permanent crew in orbit,” Mike Suffredini, NASA’s space station program manager, told the Soyuz crew Tuesday.

Assuming an on-time liftoff, Romanenko plans to oversee an automated approach and docking to an Earth-facing port on the front end of the space station’s Russian Zarya module at 8:36 a.m. Friday. Waiting to welcome their new crewmates aboard will be Expedition 20 commander Gennady Padalka, NASA flight engineer Michael Barratt, and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.

Padalka and Barratt were launched to the station March 26 aboard the Soyuz TMA-14 spacecraft. Wakata was launched aboard the shuttle Discovery on March 15, becoming Japan’s first full-time station crew member.

The Soyuz TMA-15 spacecraft at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

(Credit:
RSC Energia)

With the arrival of Romanenko, De Winne, and Thirsk, all five of the space agencies building the International Space Station will be represented by full-time crew members for the first time.

“(A) six-person crew is a milestone in the history of the International Space Station,” Thirsk said before launch. “In a big way, the International Space Station will be able to fulfill its primary purpose, which is to function as a world-class orbiting laboratory for medical science and materials science.

“But there are also practical issues to consider as well with a crew of six and one of our goals, with our three colleagues in orbit, is to prove that the station can support six people for a long duration.”

commentary (Credit:
Matt Asay)

I’ve known Steve Pearson for a year or two, and have always been blown away by how aggressive his company, CBS Interactive, has been with adopting open source. MySQL, Linux, Spring, Lucene, etc. etc. The list of open-source projects that CBS Interactive deploys is long.

Why? Why does CBS Interactive use open source? According to Steve:

Speed of development (rapid prototyping);
Ease of access (Access to the code as well as documentation);
Expandability (Ability to contribute back to the core product);
Cost.

Steve went on to describe three projects that it has moved to open source. It turns out that the company’s adoption of open source has evolved over time, based on bad experiences with proprietary software (and its vendors). CBS Interactive replaced and revamped its content management system with open source. It runs its David Letterman site on open source. And so on.

As Steve noted, the pace of adoption of open source is only going to increase, with two particular things of interest:

Instant websites - Open source is making it easy to combine projects quickly to launch a robust, killer website.
Quickening pace of innovation - Open source allows users to build off others’ innovations which shortens development cycles.

Steve was very clear that open source is delivering benefits that proprietary software simply cannot match. It’s not a question of mere cost. That was actually the last benefit Steve suggested - an afterthought.

No, the real benefits come from flexibility, pace of innovation, etc.

EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com’s hosted compute cloud.

The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.

Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.

The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in computing demand, he explained. It taps into Amazon’s Web services for hosted servers and storage, called Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

EnterpriseDB has not announced pricing, but the company is looking at usage models in which customers pay for use of the database by the hour or by the month.

Potential customers are either enterprises that have custom applications that run on EntrerpriseDB or Web 2.0 start-ups that only want to pay for computing power as needed, Zurek said. He said tests show that application performance over the Internet does not degrade substantially.

He argued that the offering will make EnterpriseDB more competitive against MySQL, the leading open-source database provider which is widely used by Web companies. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion earlier this month.

Google’s shares, which have dropped about 18 percent so far this year, closed at $564.30. They reached an all-time high of $747.24 in November.

Net earnings for the fourth quarter were $1.21 billion, or $3.79 a share, including one-time items such as stock-based compensation, compared to $1 billion, or $3.29 a share, a year ago. Excluding those items, earnings were $1.41 billion, or $4.43 a share.

Total revenue rose 51 percent to $4.83 billion, compared to $3.2 billion a year ago. Excluding traffic acquisition costs, or commission paid to content partners, revenue was $3.39 billion, compared to $2.23 billion a year earlier. Such costs represent 30 percent of ad revenues. Google, as always, did not offer guidance.

Meanwhile, executives said their business had not been affected by any slowdown in the U.S. economy, despite worries of spending cuts in online advertising during an economic downturn. In fact, Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told analysts in a conference call that he is optimistic about 2008 based on “ad dollars continuing to move from offline to online, a trend which of course is not going to reverse.”

“We have not yet seen any negative impact from rumors of future recessions,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Spending on search advertising in the United States is expected to rise from $8.6 billion last year to $11 billion this year, according to eMarketer.

Google has 56.3 percent market share for Web search in the United States, more than three times Yahoo’s 17.7 percent and Microsoft’s 13.8 percent, according to Nielsen Online. Meanwhile, Google also has unseated Yahoo as the top Web property worldwide, according to ComScore.

Meanwhile, Google is branching into other markets like mobile and hosted applications and beefing up ads on its YouTube video site to diversify from its reliance on search-based ads.

“We have found that social networking inventory is not monetizing as well as expected,” said Chief Financial Officer George Reyes.

On Tuesday, Yahoo said it would lay off 1,000 workers, and it gave lukewarm guidance, despite posting earnings that beat Wall Street expectations.

This post was updated at 3 p.m. PST with comments from a conference call.

Google on Thursday said its fourth-quarter revenue rose more than 50 percent and profit rose 17 percent, but the figures were just short of Wall Street expectations. Shares were down more than 8 percent in after-hours trading as a result.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial were expecting Google to post fourth-quarter earnings per share of $4.44, excluding items, and revenue of $3.45 billion, excluding traffic acquisition costs.

Clicks on advertisements on Google and its partner Web sites rose about 30 percent from a year ago, which was a deceleration from previous quarters, executives said. Google also had trouble making money off ads on social networking sites, they added. Under its deal with MySpace, Google is committed to paying revenue even if consumers don’t click on ads.

The suit was first reported by InformationWeek.

Levitte accuses Google of fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment in the complaint. The suit was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., and seeks class action status.

Update at 10:44 a.m. PDT: I added Google’s “no comment.” Update at 9:50 a.m. PDT: I added more details from the complaint.

The ads cost $136.11, part of a $887.67 Levitte ad campaign on Google that lasted from June 1, 2007, to August 18, 2007, the report said.

AttorneyHal K. Levitte has sued Google over ads that cost $136.11 but that allegedly didn’t yield any useful results.

“Google’s conduct is unfair because Google fails to disclose that customers’ ads are placed on parked domains and error page sites, and Google does not provide an effective means for customers to preclude those ads from appearing on these sites. In fact, until March 2008, Google provided no means at all for customers to exclude their ads from appearing on these sites,” the complaint said.

Google has no comment until it reviews the complaint, said spokesman Jon Murchinson.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Google placed 202,528 Levitte International ads shown in relation to parked domain pages–Internet addresses that have been registered but that have no Web pages–and 1,009 ads on error pages that can be shown when people type invalid URLs into their browsers, according to the report of the suit. From the ads, Levitte got 668 clicks from the parked pages and 25 clicks from the error pages, but no conversions from any of that into useful business leads.

“Domain and error page ads accounted for approximately 16.2 percent of all clicks on plaintiff’s ads during his campaign, yet did not result in a single person completing the online form on the site, or contacting the plaintiff by phone or e-mail,” the complaint said.

The suit seeks compensatory damages, an injunction prohibiting the practices under question, and reimbursement for legal expenses.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

That mode contrasts to attacks on databases, the method used to compromise 45.7 million accounts over a two-year period in a data breach of customer records at TJX Companies, the operator of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls retail chains.

The malware was installed on computer servers at each of the 300-some stores operated by Hannaford and its partners, the Globe reported.

The breach appears to be one of the first in which credit card numbers were stolen while the information was in transit, or at the point of sale. One of a growing number of sophisticated attacks, it illustrates vulnerabilities in the communication between cash registers and branch servers, as Neal Krawetz of Hacker Factor Solutions has warned in research (PDF).

It turns out malware somehow found its way onto a Maine-based supermarket chain’s servers, which led to the security breach announced earlier this month compromising up to 4.2 million credit cards.

The company is continuing its investigation into how the malware may have been placed on the servers. The Secret Service, meanwhile is conducting its own investigation.

Andrew Conry of InformationWeek adds that Hannaford, in addition to the breach, has two related class action lawsuits on its hands alleging negligence in maintaining customer security. And he suggests that there might be some truth to the claims, noting that Hannaford should have noticed that “internal servers were transmitting outside the network to a strange IP. This should’ve raised flags somewhere–server logs, IDS logs, firewall logs.”

I’ll second Conry’s conclusion: “In any case, the whole mess should be very instructional to retailers everywhere,” particularly in light of Friday’s news of attacks on top Web sites like USAToday.com, Target.com, ABCNews.com, Walmart.com, and of a data breach at Antioch University in Ohio.

Citing a letter the Hannaford grocer sent to Massachusetts regulators, The Boston Globe on Friday reported that the malicious software intercepted data from customers as they paid with plastic at checkout counters and sent data overseas.