Convergence is finally here. For what else is triple play, the delivery of Internet, phone and TV over the same connection? Providers can deliver all three at lowered costs, but deployment has been slower than expected.

If you have ever watched a video on YouTube, you can say you have experienced IPTV (Internet Protocol Television). But IPTV more specifically refers to the delivery of traditional TV channels directly on the television screen. While one can forgive a YouTube video for being grainy and jerky, watching TV delivered over the Internet must be of the highest quality. IPTV promises channel zapping, interactivity, picture-in-picture, digital video recording, and High-Definition capabilities. Another promise of IPTV is to deliver content to the user whichever screen is using at the time by connecting TV, PC and other IP devices.

Comcast TV

Comcast, for one, is promoting a triple play subscription for $99 a month for the first year. The on-demand portion of the package includes TV shows, movies, music and documentaries. Verizon’s Triple Freedom offer also flirts with the $100 mark. AT&T’s Quad Pack is the most expensive at $134 a month. For comparison, the leading Internet service providers in France offer triple play for around 29 euros a month ($39 a month).

The number of IPTV subscribers in North America is projected to more than double in 2007, reaching 1 million homes, according to Strategy Analytics. In four years, it will be 11 million. But according to a report from Telephony Online, telcos deploying the new technology have suffered significant headaches and AT&T’s CTO Chris Rice told BusinessWeek that rolling out IPTV was “a lot more complex than people thought it would be.” Many of the problems stemmed from the middleware, some of it developed by Microsoft. As a result, 2006 saw slower adoption than expected and 2007 is now touted as the year IPTV will take over in North America.

Joost, the latest project from the founders of the Voice over IP service Skype, is not officially available yet, but it is generating lots of interest including from venture capitalists who have poured $45 million into the project. Because Joost is based on peer-to-peer technology, every viewer both downloads and uploads data, contributing to the bandwidth available.

Available in beta, Joost lets viewers watch high-quality TV programs and promises the interactivity that Internet users have come to expect. Searching, chatting and instant messaging with other views are part of the experience. Viacom, Warner Music, Endemol ad the NHL are among the content providers who have signed contracts with Joost.

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Whether amateur or professionally-produced, some content with the ambition to capture sizable audiences is made for the Net and for the Net only.

Diggnation, a weekly show hosted by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of Digg fame, hit its 100^th episode in early June. Diggnation is essentially a podcast about high-tech which attracts sponsors such as Netflix, Microsoft and IBM. The show is available at Revision3 which bills itself the “first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation.”

Diggnation

Created by Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose and a few other young entrepreneurs, Revision3 is designed for an audience who wants “a more gritty, edgy, highly-targeted and in-depth form of entertainment.” Besides Diggnation, Revision3 carries more recently-created shows like notmtv about the independent music scene or Geekdrome which discusses movies, comics and video games. The site claims over 1.5 million downloads a month and recently attracted funding from investors like Marc Andreessen and Greylock Partners.

The name Revision3 embodies the vision of the company founders about the evolution of the old TV model: “Revision 1: Cable, adding general interest channels, catering to most common denominator. Revision 2: PC-based Internet video, indy films, no business model, no loyalty, no audience. Revision3: TV and Internet converge. iPods, Tivo, mobile, broadband enable mass, loyal audience to shift to on-demand, niche content.”

Justin.tv is another example of a made-for-the-net show. In February, Justin Kan attached a video and a mike to his head and became the first 24/7 reality show subject. As one might expect, things get boring watching Justin go about his life, moving or signing up for phone service. To spice things up, Justin.tv is adding channels. The latest recruit is iJustine.tv, the video blog of a Pittsburgh web designer. At any time, a couple hundred fans are watching.

On YouTube, several contributors have reached a popularity that could previously only have been achieved on TV: Renetto, Ben Going and others federate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers.

In his career, Steven Bochco has won 10 Emmy Awards for his acclaimed TV series, Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue. The 63-year old is not what one would call an amateur. But after years of creating scripted, 60-minutes episodes starring professionals actors and costing up to $3 million a pop, Bochco was tempted to try his hand at new media. In March, he created a series of 44 episodes in which young people tell short and confidential stories about embarrassing moments. Billed “Cafe Confidential”, the series is available on video-sharing site Metacafe.

Metacafe

Bochco is not the only old media type who finds what is going on online interesting. Michael Eisner, the former head of Walt Disney, and Time Warner Investments are backing the video-sharing site Veoh Networks. Mixing old and new approach, Veoh launched a channel with USmagazine.com which will include user-contributed celebrity videos. Veoh is counting on quality as a differentiator and has announced that they will bring DVD-quality Internet video directly to televisions by collaborating with companies like AMD, closing the loop between TV and computer viewing.

In a reverse move, MySpace, a symbol of the Web 2.0, is using recipes from traditional TV to attract audiences and rekindle voter participation in young people. MySpace has announced it would launch a reality show called “Independent” in which candidates will vie to be the choice of young voters. The show will be produced by Mark Burnett considered a pioneer of reality television. This professionally-produced content should also prove easier to sell to advertisers.

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Whether for free or for a fee, Wi-Fi is becoming more pervasive. In hotel rooms and campgrounds, airport waiting rooms and city buses, computer users can connect to the Internet at will.

In the Bay Area, Internet users just got some good news from AC Transit. On 78 buses crisscrossing the area, laptops should become a common sight. AC Transit hopes to attract new riders who want to be productive during their commute. The $340,000 grant from the Alameda County Congestion Management Agency covers two years of access fees. After that, the fares from new riders should continue paying for access.

Train commuters on the Caltrain line from Gilroy to San Francisco and on the Capitol Corridor from Auburn to San Jose have already been able to connect wirelessly through experiments that have been going on for years. Google employees can also work on the bus ride to campus. The 32 company buses cover 230 miles of freeways from Concord to Santa Cruz and offer wireless Internet access to employees who say the bus improves their quality of life and makes them feel better about leaving their car at home.

Many coffeehouses advertise free Wi-Fi as a way to attract clients who are as addicted to their Internet connexion as they are to their morning cup of coffee. Starbucks has chosen the fee-based route with a $10 a day connexion over T-Mobile. Regardless, it is possible to do business from a coffee shop about anywhere in the country.

Hotels quickly discovered that business and pleasure guests alike put an Internet connexion on the top of their wish list. Most hotels now offer some kind of solution, whether free or not. But according to HotelChatter, the situation reached an impasse in 2007. “Instead of finding more and more hotels offering free Wi-Fi, we are finding more restrictions are being added to free hotel Wi-Fi. For instance, you can get free Wi-Fi in the lobby, but in-rooms it’s Ethernet and it starts at $9.95. Or you can get free Wi-Fi in your rooms but you need to belong to a hotel’s loyalty program or be assigned a code with a special password,” wrote HotelChatter in its annual look at hotels with the best and worst Wi-Fi.

As far as wiring a whole city, compliments go to Google. Again. Since August of last year, the Mountain View company has provided free Internet access to city dwellers and visitors. “The U.S are behind in terms of access options and speed. We want to show entrepreneurs that it is technically possible and not very expensive to build such a network,” Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, told me at the time. He explained that some Internet providers were suing cities trying to offer an alternative network for unfair competition and that he hoped Mountain View’s very public example would discourage this practice.

In San Francisco, plans to provide both free Internet wireless access and a more sophisticated paying system are being delayed by long city procedures. But promoters swear the service is coming soon. Other cities including Philadelphia and Portland are getting used to laptops popping up on city parks and benches.

European start-up Fon is coming to the US. “Foneros”, as its customers are called, use a special router that lets them turn their private connexion into a Wi-Fi hotspot available to other “foneros” for free. In exchange, they can hop on someone else’s connexion when they travel the world. In the U.S., Fon just signed a deal with Time Warner Cable. Even people who are not Fon customers can access the Internet for few dollars, less than the $10 charged by Starbucks and T-Mobile.

Roaming computer users should add this site to their favorites. Unless, they prefer this one which lets them find a Wi-Fi hotspot near them.

On a personal note, I should mention that I wrote and sent this article from my public library whose wireless network has become a lifesaver whenever my Comcast connexion is on the lame. What would I do without free public wireless connexion?

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Professionals have been expected to be “always on” for a long time. Now young people crave that same permanent contact whether they are on their computer or on their cell phones. As for parents, they want to keep track of their children at all times. Here is how they can do it.

Tracking the kids. At Verizon, they call it Chaperone. For $9.99 a month, parents can keep track of the family from their cell phone or PC. If they add the Child Zone feature ($19.99 a month), they can even be notified each time the child leaves a predetermined zone. Sprint calls its service Family Locator. It helps a parent or caregiver know where the carrier of an authorized cell phone is at any time. With the Safety Check feature, they can be notified that a child has reached school or any other programmed location. The $9.99 month fee includes up to 4 Sprint Nextel phones.

Wherify has a similar service with handsets geared towards children (and seniors) which include GPS tracking so that parents can always locate their child. These services will only work if the phone is turned on. They raise interesting parenting and trust issues, especially as the children get older.

Loopt. Geared towards young cell phone users, this GPS-based locating service is currently available to Boost Mobile customers. For a $2.99 a month fee, subscribers can locate their friends who have agreed to be tracked on a live map displayed on their cell phones. In addition, they can receive an alert when a friend is close by. Loopt is all about facilitating real-life meetings and has been called a “social mapping service”. Helio, another mobile carrier targeting young people, offers a similar service with its Buddy Beacon. But in order to preserve the users’ privacy, they have to update their location whenever they are willing to be visible to their friends. “Synchronize your social lives” is how Helio describes this trend.

Twitter. “What are you doing?” is the question Twitter members are constantly asking their friends. On Twitter’s web site or by text messaging, the questions and answers twitter back and forth like birds perched on a phone line. “Twitter allows me to broadcast to my circle of acquaintances all those life titbits which are so trivial and yet so important to the ties we create – and to receive the same titbits from the people you are important to me. We can stay in touch, and even reinforce our ties together”, writes a Swiss user of Twitter.

Moblogs. Blogging directly from a cell phone or PDA is the next step in keeping one’s readers constantly updated about one’s whereabouts and adventures. Moblogs often include pictures, a great way to immerse readers in the experience that the blogger wants to share. Moblogging is the ultimate in blogging “on the fly”. Kyte is a site that combines moblogging and social networking. “You feel like you are instantly broadcasting your own life and experiences to your friends at home, and to anyone in the world who wants to join,” Walter Zai told The New York Times after using Kyte during a safari vacation in South Africa. But he admitted to being a bit overwhelmed by the instant feedback to which he would respond “I don’t really have the time to talk to you now. I have to make photos of these elephants.” While all the services above can be turned off, users seem to feel a compelling need to stay in touch, one that can easily become overwhelming or frightening.

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A former manager at HP and IBM, James Kao is well aware that the computer industry is producing tons of waste, some of them toxic, which are too often dumped into third-world countries. With GreenCitizen, he has made it his mission to find innovative solutions and to educate consumers.

It is 10 a.m. on a weekday morning and GreenCitizen’s San Francisco store is opening its doors, a few blocks down from the Moscone Center. Within an hour, clients have dropped off eleven computer monitors and an old VHS player. Business is brisk. James Kao, GreenCitizen’s founder and CEO, is cautiously optimistic. “It took 30 years to create this problem, it won’t be solved overnight.”

Whether customers found him on Google or through word-of-mouth, Kao believes in providing them with some facts. In the store, the “wall of shame” features a photo of a young Chinese boy sitting on a pile of e-waste and data brings the problem into focus: lead, mercury and other toxic components contained in electronic products cause specific harm to humans. GreenCitizen’s Web site is also educational. There you learn that, every year, “an estimated 400 million units of obsolete electronics are scrapped. By 2010, this figure will rise to three billion units.”

California is at the forefront of the battle. In 2003, the legislature enacted the Electronic Waste Recycling Act (SB 20/SB 50) which applies an e-waste fee to new equipment sold in California to manage the collection and recycling of some wastes. As a result, consumers are not charged when they want to recycle TV screens, computer monitors and laptops. The collector reports these to the California Integrated Waste Management Board and receives 25 cents a pound.

However, when they bring CPU units, printers, keyboards or DVD players to GreenCitizen, individuals and businesses are charged fees that range from one to 10 dollars. Most of them seem to think it is worth it. GreenCitizen also provides hard disk destruction and cell phone erasure services for their customers’ peace of mind.

The main thing they can be sure about is that their used electronics will not be loaded in a container headed for China or Africa in violation of the Basel Action Network rules. “We use two processors who are among the 12 processors in California who have signed the Basel agreement. We guarantee that everything is demanufactured in this country,” says Kao.

With 800 businesses and 30,000 individuals trusting GreenCitizen since it opened its first store in Palo Alto two years ago (over 50% of them repeat customers), Kao says that his business just about breaks even. He is working on other ways to improve recycling and his business model.

“There is not enough value in the metals, but there is value in the information. Don’t you think that Dell or HP would want to know what products are breaking down as they invest in their next generation of products?,” asks Kao. He envisions selling the information to the manufacturers or giving them the chance to sponsor the recycling of their own products to bolster their environmental image with their clients.

In addition, he wants to reform recycling abroad. “I want to develop a reverse supply chain and design a factory that can be deployed in third-world countries. We would run or licence these factories. Because of cheap labor, it would still be less expensive to do it in those countries. But it would be safer,” says Kao with an approach that mixes environmental concerns and business sense.

As the door opens, Kao bounces over to a new customer. “Welcome to GreenCitizen,” he greets him with boundless energy.

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With consumers spending more time online, especially on networking sites and other user-generated sites, advertisers have learned to take their message to these new spaces. It is forcing brands out of their comfort zone into a chaotic online world where they have less control over their image and where empowered consumers can distort their messages. In addition, some companies and CEOs are using blogs to get their views out. Here too, the lesson is that consumers can fire back in a way they never could before.

• What is a corporate blog good for?
  Corporate blogs come in all shapes and forms. They can have many missions from sharing products news to collecting feedback from customers to discussing high-level issues impacting an industry. But corporate blogging is not for the faint of heart. As Walmart’s fake blog showed last year, corporate bloggers and companies who are not prepared to be honest as well as timely and personal could see the whole effort backfire. Here are seven corporate blogs worth a look.
• Damage control in the user-generated world
  Savvy Internet users can distort brand messages and their clever creations can get around the Web to thousands of viewers in minutes. This is the brave new world that companies must learn to live in.
• Marketers worm their way into user-generated content
  Brands are following consumers to social networking sites, blogs and Second Life. The “momentum effect” has huge potential, but will consumers ignore or even reject these marketing efforts?

Corporate blogs come in all shapes and forms. They can have many missions from sharing products news to collecting feedback from customers to discussing high-level issues impacting an industry. But corporate blogging is not for the faint of heart. As Walmart’s fake blog showed last year, corporate bloggers and companies who are not prepared to be honest as well as timely and personal could see the whole effort backfire. Here are seven corporate blogs worth a look.

FastLane: General Motors’ Corporate Blog

Wal-Mart’s blogging wars. Even after the Wal-Marting across America blog recounting the adventures of a couple camping on Wal-Mart parking lots was exposed as a PR ploy, Wal-Mart is still a source of intensive blogging activity. In one corner, Working families for Wal-Mart defends the argument that the retail giant is good to its employees and good for American communities. In the other corner, Wal-Mart critics expose their views on this blog mostly made up of press reviews.

LinkedIn. Just in time to celebrate its fourth anniversary, professional networking site LinkedIn launched a blog. The stated objectives are “to not only help you leverage LinkedIn more effectively but also to provide you a sounding board for all things LinkedIn.” Tutorials, product announcements and focus group all in one.

Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal. A collaborative blog from a range of Yahoo employees and execs (even David Filo recently chimed in about an initiative to pick the greenest American city), Yodel Anecdotal jumps from announcing new feature to welcoming interns on campus. How do they designate who is up next?

GM’s FastLane. Here is another collaborative blog where General Motors VP-level execs get excited about their accomplishments (driving a fuel cell vehicle 300 miles without refueling), deflect criticism or otherwise share why GM is a great company. The company has actually chosen to keep several blogs : FYI is written by GM employees and others while Cadillac Drivers’ Log recounts the adventures of two engineers taking the new Cadillac CTS for a test drive around the world.

Accenture. “Here you’ll find blogs about emerging technologies and career experiences from select employees. The opinions of the writers do not necessarily reflect the position of Accenture on these subjects,” warns Accenture’s blogging portal. Accenture keeps up no less than seven blogs which range from insights from non-Accenture company leaders to the technological musings of an Accenture Technology Labs senior researcher to a recruiter’s blog and an “experienced consultants” blog.

6 a.m.Richard Edelman, the CEO of the eponymous PR agency, started blogging back in 1994 which must make him one of the earliest and longest-running CEO blogger. “My intention is to share trends in communications, the issues, lessons and insights that I gather from managing this firm, » he wrote at the time. Despite that good personal record, it was his agency that masterminded the Wal-Mart blog fiasco. But a blogging CEO must learn to take the heat in the very public way. Witness this comment left in response to a post: “Just like the egotist CEOs of old, the big PR agency honchos - like you - are also on their way out…It shows just how bankrupt your agency is when it comes to ethics.”

Leclerc. Michel-Edouard Leclerc is the outspoken CEO of the French distribution group Leclerc and probably the highest-profile corporate blogger in France. A blog seemed like a natural venue for him to express his views on all kind of topics pertaining to his company’s business environment and French society in general. Judging on the number of comments, he has managed to develop a decent readership.

 
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Savvy Internet users can distort brand messages and their clever creations can get around the Web to thousands of viewers in minutes. This is the brave new world that companies must learn to live in.

Since October 2006, ReputationDefender has allowed individuals to track what is being said about them on the Internet. If they don’t like what they hear, they can ask the ReputationDefender team to remove offending items within certain limits (it is impossible to remove news items or government records). Now companies are knocking on the door. 

ReputationDefender started out defending the little guy. CEO and founder Michael Fertik likes to say that his company helps victims of online smear campaigns defend themselves against their critics and that we are all potential clients. It might have started with jilted lovers and vindictive co-workers, but companies quickly became interested in ReputationDefender’s services. 

“When companies try to get stuff removed from the Internet, it could get them attacked even more,” says Michael Fertik. But it is not stopping them. “We are getting calls from companies all the time.” As a result, Fertik started a new service which he does not advertise openly on his site. “Public figures and some executives started asking us to bury results on Google. A few companies are doing it for their products. We understand the maths of the search engine and we can make it look organic,” explains Michael Fertik. He will not discuss specific customers or reveal the size of his client base. 

As Fertik knows, efforts to remove damaging data can backfire and could prove impossible as Digg found out when it tried to remove posts revealing the key to break the protection on HD-DVD discs. Users just kept posting the information again faster than Digg could take it down. To some extent, brands are having to live with users spoofing and changing their message. An article on DM News quoted the example of General Motors which launched an online ad contest only to see an environmentally-minded user take the opportunity to create and distribute an ad with the words “Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad. It’s a frightening reality.” 

Another example was the storm back in March around an Apple “1984” ad spoof which portrayed Hillary Clinton as a Big Brother figure and Barak Obama as a new kind of politician. While the ad did not poke fun at Apple itself, the company must have had mixed feelings about it. After all, the spoof implied that the original ad was a powerful cultural icon and it featured an iPod. There is no such thing as bad publicity as popular wisdom goes. And if the information is slanderous, there are legal recourses.

Brands are following consumers to social networking sites, blogs and Second Life. The “momentum effect” has huge potential, but will consumers ignore or even reject these marketing efforts?

Among the options for Internet users wanting to create and share content, social networking is probably the most pervasive experience in the life of the 15 to 34-year old crowd. A full 70% of them now belong to a social network according to US ComScore figures. On a given month, an estimated 60 million Americans use MySpace. A study commissioned by MySpace found that these Internet users view social networking as a way to add fun and excitement to their life both online and offline. 

But the “Never-Ending Friending” study also found 40% of those surveyed have “discovered brands and products that they really like” on social networks. “Friending is the next advertising. Across markets, social networking users consistently expressed their desire for brands and organizations to treat them less like customers…and more like friends,” wrote the researchers in their study. In a new twist on viral marketing, users expose their community to the brands they have accepted as friends. 

In segmenting MySpace users by categories, the study reports that “the See & Be Seens are the segment most influenced by product and brand advertising; 90% use the medium to learn about brands and products, versus just 31% for the average user.” That’s music to the ears of marketers thinking about investing the social networking space. The study looked at two campaigns by Adidas and Electronic Arts on MySpace. It concluded that, given the “momentum effect”, social networks offer an opportunity to increase brand loyalty and advocacy and should therefore attract more marketers in the future. 

Nissan and Adidas on Second Life

To which Joe Marchese retorted in his OnlineSpin column that “There is a critical point at which the commercialization of any medium erodes the value of that medium for consumers. The point is this: If tomorrow every advertiser began creating profiles within MySpace in parallel with coordinated promotions and friending efforts, the balance of the MySpace ecosystem would shift considerably, likely resulting in stunting MySpace’s real growth, and disenfranchising its current population.” Will MySpace heed that warning considering that branded advertising now reportedly accounts for 70% of its revenue mix?

Beyond social networking 

Word-of-mouth marketing infiltrating personal blogs and YouTube preparing to sandwich ads between the videos of its most popular contributors are all part of the same trend to monetize the popularity and influence of online communities. One of the hottest places to be seen for real-life companies is Second Life. Adidas (again), Reebok, Nissan, American Apparel, Reuters and many more have set up shop in Second Life’s virtual community. 

“The goal is to build a community in Second Life that is really engaged and really excited and really involved,” Reuben Steiger, whose company Millions of Us has helped clients like General Motors and Warner Bros move into SL, told the Associated Press. But according to reporter Wagner James Au who has been blogging about Second Life since its beginning in 2003, “For the most part, real world companies and organizations are having negligible impact on Second Life society as a whole.” That’s because SL users tend to attract more foot traffic to their own virtual clothing stores and car dealerships than the real-life newcomers.

 “Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age”, a study released on May 17, warns about a new marketing ecosystem “that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual three dimensional worlds…transforming how food and beverage companies do business with young people in the twenty-first century.” The trend is here to stay.

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 Videogame players get fully immersed in gaming worlds replete with advertising and brand messages.

When Sony launched Everquest II in 2005, it made it possible for captivated players to order a Pizza Hut pizza without ever leaving the game. At the time, the news was widely reported in the gaming and general media as one of the most blatant examples of in-game advertising.

Since then, the interest in in-game advertising or “game-vertising” has not abated. In February, Google entered that market as part of its expansion in all things advertising. Google acquired Adscape Media, a company which “offers dynamic delivery of advertising with plot and storyline integration. Adscape Media supports sophisticated demographic and geographic targeting and also provides a robust reporting interface for marketers” according to a company statement. All the new partners have said is that they are “in discussion with many in the game development community and hope to partner with both large and small game publishing companies.”

The purchase was Google’s response to Microsoft’s incursion in the field of in-game advertising. Last year, the maker of the Xbox acquired Massive, its own in-game advertising arm. The company’s technology tracks gamers’ actions and serve them ads on billboards and signs inside the game. According to Massive, more than 50 titles for the Xbox 360 and the Xbox are now part of its ad network including Ubisoft’s “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2” and Microsoft’s “Crackdown”. That number is expected to reach 100 titles by the end of the year.

At the time of the purchase, the president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices group Robbie Bach told news.com that ad messages in games could be very effective. “They get it, and they may not even know they got it,” he said. However he warned, “Make sure whatever you do doesn’t interfere with the game playing experience. Do not interrupt someone when they are gaming. It is a very immersive experience.”

As advertisers struggle to find alternatives to traditional media, games are looking like an attractive option.  It is estimated that 20 million of the more than 25 million 12-17 year-olds in the U.S. are gamers. But more interestingly, videogames are no longer reserved to teenage boys. According to the Entertainment Software Association, the average game player is 30 years old and 43% of all gamers are women, a marketer’s dream.

“Now that in-game advertising has been proven effective, brands with seven-figure budgets for this year have been approaching the major players. This supports the general expectation that the market will grow by 40 percent to 50 percent in 2007. The latest market-size estimates for 2010 range between $1 billion and $2 billion,” wrote Justin Townsend, CEO and co-founder of in-game advertising company IGA Worldwide in a recent column in MediaWeek. Even if Mr. Townsend can be suspected of being over-enthusiastic, in-game advertising is a promising “niche.”

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