On August 4th 2008, the US Court of Appeals permitted Cablevision Cable Company to offer the services of digital video recording (DVR) to customers who do not own personal Tivo hard drives. The alternative, endorsed by the Second Circuit in New York, allows cable companies to record the programs to a central datacenter, thereby mitigating capital expenditures. Redlasso, an online Web site recently forced to suspend their video search, post, and clip services due to legal action by Fox and NBC, may have a viable business plan as a result of this decision. If a Redlasso user purchases the right to record digital video from a cable company, what is to stop that customer from transferring those rights to his account with Redlasso?

In such a scenario, Redlasso is acting as the internet-provider of digital video to cable company DVR customers. Of course, this hinges on the cooperation between Redlasso and cable companies, who may want to develop this service independently. Another possible obstacle is that Redlasso’s video content is delivered over the Internet rather than over the television. Hank Williams of the Silicon Valley Insider does not see this as a problem:

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For the first time fiber-optic broadband Internet is more popular than cable, although most of the growth is taking place overseas, says a new report from British research firm Point Topic.

According to the company, nearly double the amount of customers registered with fiber-optic Internet services than with cable providers—4.2 million customers versus 2.5 million customers in the first fiscal quarter of 2008.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of the new subscribers are in Asia, the fastest-growing region of Internet users in the world.

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Last week Yahoo announced large partnerships with seven mobile carriers in Asia that will give it a significant advantage in the quickly growing mobile Internet market.

The Sunnyvale-based Internet company’s deals involve five online mobile search partnerships and two advertising partnerships, putting it at the head of the mobile search market in front of rivals Google and Microsoft.

The online mobile search partnerships are with Mahanagar Telephon Nigam Ltd. of India, China’s Hong Kong CSL Ltd., Smart Communications, Digital Mobile Phlis, Inc. of the Philippines, andVibo Telecom Inc. of Taiwan.

The mobile advertising partnerships are with Maxis Communications Berhad of Malaysia, and Idea Cellular Limited of India.

The partnerships will make Yahoo the standard search engine on many of Asia’s mobile phones, a position that is quite valuable considering Google’s inferior number in the same category.

Although its rank in online search and advertising fall well behind Google, these overseas partnerships give Yahoo a powerful position in mobile media-one of the fastest-growing Web 2.0 platforms.

In addition, Asia is quickly growing into the world’s largest Internet and mobile service regions, further bolstering Yahoo’s future business plans.

Within the last year and a half, Yahoo has brokered 60 similar partnerships worldwide, including one with T-Mobile, a lesser mobile carrier in the U.S. but a large one in Europe. With the latest deals, Asia now has about one-third of those partnerships.

The deals come in the aftermath of failed negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo, with the company looking to better its image.

Yahoo also announced new email domain names, seemingly in a similar public relations effort. New users can register under newly formed Ymail and Rocketmail.

The new startup gives users the salaries and company reviews of employees from America’s top businesses as long as they do the same.

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Ben Casnocha, a born and raised San-Franciscan, has seen it all. At 12 he started his first company right when the dotcom bubble burst. At 16 he was the CEO of Comcate, his second company, an e-government technology firm. At 17 he was nominated ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ by Inc Magazine. And by the age of 19 Ben had published his first book: “My Start-Up Life”: What a [Very] Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. L’Atelier caught up with Ben, now a college student at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles for a few words of wisdom.

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