The acquisition deal is structured as an asset purchase between UGO Entertainment, which itself was acquired by Hearst Corp back in July 2007 for a reported $100 million plus, and the Ziff Davis Games Group who owned the 1UP Network. Sadly, the acquisition also meant a number of lay-offs at 1UP, with the ‘1Up Yours,’ ‘1Up FM’ and ‘1Up Show’ podcasts being terminated.

In addition, Ziff-Davis has made official the closure of gaming magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly. Its January issue will be its last after nearly 20 years of publication. The demise of print media continues.

(Very cool image by Kotaku)

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Lok8u Launches GPS Child Locator Watch at CES originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Growing up as a teenager can be hard. At a time when youths are still discovering themselves and seeking acceptance from their peers (or strangers), what does one do? Let it all out on MySpace, of course. According to a study published in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 54-percent of the 500 MySpace profiles studied mentioned sex, alcohol, and violence on their respective user pages. The users were a mix of male and females, and were all 18 years of age.

In a similar and somewhat hopeful study, the doctors chose 190 different profiles of users between 18 and 20 years old that mentioned sex, substance abuse, or violence three or more times. The doctors then created their own profile page under the name "Dr. Meg," and sent the users an e-mail regarding the risks of publishing certain information, and also different clinical resources they could research. After three months, the researchers found that 42.1-percent of users that received the email -- and 29.5-percent of users that did not -- removed the risky language from their profile pages, or made their pages private. Seems a lot of the teens may have simply been venting, or didn't realize the risks of what they were doing at the time.

It's tough to say if youths are actually more obsessed with risky behavior than times before social networking was popular, but clearly publishing such information online for the world to see increases any potential danger. There are countless people out there who can and will take advantage of others, and giving them an easy in for communication through a site like MySpace -- especially after showing interest in sex, drugs, and/or violence -- means we all need to be a bit more careful on what we and our children post online. [From: CNN]

Study Shows Teens on MySpace Often Talk Sex, Violence originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wibe7.tv allows you to perform YouTube searches and return results based on relevance, views, rating, or publish date. Granted, nothing earth-shattering there. Instead, it's the way the results are arranged that makes finding that video you're seeking much easier. It's strikingly similar to PicClick, a visual search of Amazon and eBay we reviewed last year.

Rather than present an obtrusive column of thumbnails coupled with large blocks of text - like YouTube's search results - Wibe7.tv discards the text, opting instead for a mosaic of thumbnails - giving you the visual content you were seeking. Suddenly, scanning the screen for your favorite video becomes a great deal easier.

Just as important, Wibe7.tv's matrix of thumbnails helps you weed out the inevitable duplicate videos that crowd YouTube. (In fact, I found myself entering a number of search terms just to see how many duplicates existed for popular videos.)

Once you find the video you want, clicking on the thumbnail begins playing the full-size video in the lower corner of your browser window. Or, you can always click through to YouTube.

While the mosaic is a helpful first pass, I found myself wishing for some mouseover functionality to deliver additional information on the content. Having to play each video to get more information becomes a bit laborious if you don't see what you want right off the bat.

Still, the ability to quickly scan for the video - instead of scrolling through multiple pages of YouTube results - made the service a welcome improvement over searching on YouTube for content.

To start looking for those YouTube videos you've been seeking, visit Wibe7.tv.

MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.

All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.

The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.

The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.

The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.

It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market - it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.

MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.

The product is compelling.

But it will quite possibly never launch.

MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.

I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.

More screen shots below - top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.

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Cool Gadgets You'll See in 2009 (Part 1) originally appeared on Switched on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

But listings are spread across lots of sites - what the industry needed was a good central search engine for all those vacation home rentals. It’s also a pain to do lots of searches on different sites because you have to enter where and when you want to go, making it a lot more complicated that a standard search engine query.

That’s just what Otalo, which just launched, is doing. They are starting off with 200,000 listings. The company was founded by Michael Giles (the founder of Furl) and Baer Tierkel. The name Otalo comes from the Zen symbol enzo - “O” - with the Finnish word for house - “talo.”

The company will earn commissions from the referral of customers to the various vacation rental sites. By the way, if you always stay in hotels on trips, you should try renting a house sometimes. It’s much calmer and usually a lot cheaper. You can also get great deals at the last minute.

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The new commenting features - built using jQuery - take their inspiration from Ubiquity, allowing users to highlight the sections of text that prompted them to comment and immediately respond. Using that context, Encouraged Commentary begins to string conversations and content together.

Encouraged Commentary currently offers three compelling features:

First, highlighting any section of a post avails a "respond" button that allows users to immediately comment. Clicking respond grabs the highlighted text and adds it - in blockquote - to the content of the comment, simply and easily referencing the exact passage that the user is discussing.

Second, working with comments, themselves, offers additional functionality. Highlighting and clicking respond within a comment automatically establishes the familiar "@user" addressing to make the intended recipient aware of the conversation directed at him/her. The highlighted text, again, is brought into the comment for reference.

Third, the connections among comments are tracked. Mousing over any commenter's name reveals a list of his or her other comments in the thread. Clicking on list items allows users to "jump between related comments and responses quickly" - something that threaded conversations have been working to capture. Reply and Quote buttons allow the user to jump into the conversation without highlighting.

Granted, the young project is not without its rough spots. Users are reporting issues with IE (shocking, I realize). And some of the implementation of the concepts could use refinement. No doubt that will come as more people engage in the project.

But those issues are easily overlooked. Because what is most compelling about this approach is the natural conversational dynamic that Jeffers has captured. You do what seems natural: highlight and respond. And you do so with context. That dynamic provides both Encouraged Commentary with content and the "hooks" to track the history of the conversation without adversely impacting the user. What's more, it provides a series of reference points that encourages new users to enter the discussion - and to do so just as easily as the conversation began.

If we see widespread adoption of this sort of thinking, it's quite possible that we may see the conversation returning to comments.

To see Encouraged Commentary in action or to try it yourself, visit Don't Trust This Guy, Jeffers' blog. To download the source code, visit the Encouraged Commentary project on GitHub.

Best Buy Joins in Refurbished iPhones Game - First it was AT&T selling them, now Best Buy is jumping on the bandwagon, selling refurbished iPhones at a $50 discount. That’s with the standard two year AT&T contract, of course. Us Canadians are still stuck paying full price.

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone to Bring Your Living Room to Your Pocket - They said they’d do it, and now they have, at least in limited demo form. Six months after Sling Media told us all they’d bring SlingPlayer to the iPhone, they’re almost making good on it. Almost. They gave NewTeeVee staff a demo of the working product, but they haven’t submitted the App yet.

Picasa for Mac Receives Condemned to Death One Day After Its Birth - They just announced the official release yesterday of Picasa for Mac, and according to one internet publication, at least, today we’re hearing its death knell, courtesy of Apple’s new web features for iLife ‘09. iPhoto specifically, has all kinds of Picasa-killing features.

Why Apple Announces Things on Tuesday - Gizmodo has a pretty neat article about the reasoning behind Apple only announcing new things/holding press events on Tuesdays. I won’t go into detail, but it has to do with the filthy, lazy print press folks and their prissy habits.

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This isn’t much of a surprise - we speculated on his future back in July when he announced (internally) the shuttering of four of his products (Xdrive, AOL Pictures, Bluestring and MyMobile). That still left him with AOL Mail, MYAOL, the AOL client, Userplane and Truveo, among others. But each of those products seemed to be a better fit in a different organization.

CEO Randy Falco’s memo to AOLers:

Dear AOL colleague,

I’m writing to tell you that Kevin Conroy has accepted a position as President of Interactive Media at Univision. I want to thank Kevin for all he’s done on behalf of AOL during his time here, particularly over the past two years. I’m proud to have worked with Kevin and happy for him as he takes on this new role.

When I arrived here two years ago, I asked Kevin to take on one of the most important and difficult assignments – to completely revamp and revitalize AOL’s suite of products, while at the same time globalizing product development and expanding our reach across the Web. I knew Kevin had the drive and discipline needed to meet and exceed this challenge.

Under Kevin’s leadership, for example, AOL Mail made a dramatic turnaround, with a steady stream of upgrades and globalization (it’s available in 48 locales) that generated a 31% increase in page views last year. Our products are now more open to developers, more widely distributed through widgets and gadgets, and are at long last back on the Mac. The iPhone apps developed under Kevin’s leadership have been huge hits, generating millions of downloads. AOL now has a strong position in video and video search, an innovative partnership with CBS Radio, a strong lineup of toolbars, reinvigorated Winamp and SHOUTcast products, and the all-new AOL Desktop. At the same time, Kevin refined our product lineup so we could devote more resources to our key products.

Having done all this and much more, Kevin told me that he very much wanted to return to his media roots. If you don’t know, Kevin came to AOL eight years ago from BMG Entertainment, and his first assignment at AOL was to build AOL Music, which is now the leading music destination on the Web. At Univision, Kevin will be responsible for developing both online and mobile experiences for the nation’s fastest-growing audience. While we’re saying goodbye to Kevin, it’s my hope that we’ll continue to work with him in his new role.

We’ll be providing transition details about the Products organization soon. In the meantime, please join me in offering Kevin our very best wishes on his future endeavors.

Randy

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