Pipe B Blog

Yahoo and Intel built their success upon widespread use of personal computers, but the two companies hope products to be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in January will mark the beginning of their Internet-fueled expansion to the world of TV as well.

The two companies have attracted several significant manufacturing and content allies in the attempt to bring new smarts and interactivity to a part of the electronics world that has remained a more passive part of people’s digital lives. Intel and Yahoo showed off Net-enabled TV prototypes in August, but the companies’ technology will be presented in more finished form at the electronics show within products by Samsung, Toshiba, and a number of new partners that have signed on since the debut.

What exactly are they trying to achieve?

For Yahoo, it’s establishment of the Widget Channel, a software foundation that can house programs for browsing photos, using the Internet’s abundant socially connected services, watching YouTube videos, or digging deeper into TV shows–and through which Yahoo will be able to show advertisements. For Intel, it’s a foothold in an industry whose microprocessors have typically been cheaper, less powerful, and less power-hungry.

Consumers continued to face online threats to their personal data and finances in 2008 from bigger, badder botnets to scams exploiting the economic downturn to more security holes in trusted sites.

But some quick action on the part of a security researcher and collaboration among Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and other companies in simultaneously releasing patches for a major flaw in an important protocol likely prevented a major attack on the Internet.

Malware jumped after the credit crisis forced the closing and consolidation of banks and other companies starting in the early fall. One report found a direct correlation between the fall of the stock market and the rise in malware. The targeted attacks include fake antivirus software scams that trick consumers into making an online transaction and phishing e-mails aimed at people whose bank had merged with another one, like Chase and Washington Mutual.

PCs weren’t the only targets for malicious hackers. Threats against newer gadgets and devices rose this year. Apple was forced to fix several holes that would allow people to compromise a password-locked iPhone and do things like view incoming SMS messages and launch applications, as well as make phone calls. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of USB thumb drives meant it was only a matter of time until they were used to spread viruses.

On the Web, as in other sectors of the economy, 2008 will be remembered as the beginning of an economic downturn. There’s no avoiding the fact that a lot of people lost their jobs.

But letting what happened at the end of the year color our thinking could lead us to overlook impressive innovation and progress in Web start-ups and online technology in general. The glimmer of hope: more companies are hiring people than firing people–even though the overall number of jobs lost far outstrips jobs gained.

The Web 2.0 battleground remained not just a fight for users of services, but a fight for developers. Competing standards for online applications, media, identity, and social networks duked it out in 2008 and will continue to do so in 2009. Many of the battles put open-source standards–such as OpenID for identity–against “walled gardens” run by single companies.

Social-network giant Facebook, for example, has been strategically slow to embrace standards, opting for its own identity system (Facebook Connect) instead of embracing OpenID, and for its own application platform as opposed to the emerging Open Social platform.

Negotiations between Warner Music Group and YouTube over renewing the licensing agreement for the record label’s music videos broke down Friday. Early Saturday, Warner, the third largest record label, removed videos from the Google-owned video site.

The impasse comes at a time when all four major labels, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and EMI, are renegotiating their licensing deals with YouTube.

“We are working actively to find a resolution with YouTube that would enable the return of our artists’ content to the site,” Warner said in a statement. “Until then, we simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide.”

YouTube has become an important revenue stream for at least one of the top labels. This week, Rio Caraeff, Universal Music’s digital chief, told CNET News that YouTube has generated “tens of millions” of dollars for the recording company this year, up 80 percent from last year.

Caraeff said that Universal and YouTube enjoy a strong relationship and that the companies are trying to expand their relationship beyond music videos. A source close to Universal said that the label will likely book nearly $100 million in video-streaming revenue–most of it from YouTube.

MySpace has officially blocked access to embedded widgets from Project Playlist, one of the myriad start-ups that lets members create music playlists and share them with friends.

This could come across negatively because MySpace runs MySpace Music, a service that competes with Project Playlist. And that’s probably why the News Corp.-owned MySpace is making it very clear that it has blocked Project Playlist because of complaints from major music labels.

“MySpace is an open platform that welcomes all developers to build rich and legitimate applications for its global community,” according to a statement from the company. “We take copyright issues very seriously and our goal is to help developers build a substantial business by creating an environment that respects rights holders and protects their content.”

The statement continued: “MySpace has received notices of infringement about Project Playlist at different times from several of the major music companies currently suing Project Playlist. Per our policy of taking very seriously the requests of rights holders to block access to third party sites that are believed to be infringing, we have evaluated the requests of the major music companies and determined that it is in our best interest not to allow Project Playlist widgets on MySpace, and effective immediately, we will no longer be allowing these widgets within the MySpace platform.”