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• Do iPhone or Android Users Watch More Video? (And Other Video Trends)
• U.S. Leads With Attack Traffic, Not Broadband Speed
• Google Won't Resume Its Street View Wi-Fi Collection
• Cal State Bans Students From Using Online Note-Selling Service
• Red Hat CEO: Software Vendor Model Is Broken
• The New Mac OS X: What Apple Has in Store for Business
• Click Fraud Incidence Shoots Up in Q3
• Why Silicon Valley Won't Be Detroit for Green Carmakers
• Live From Cupertino, Part One: Apple Refreshes Its iLife Suite
• Apple Announces iLife '11 With New iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand
• Kontiki Raises $10.7M to Give Each Company Its Own YouTube
• On the GreenBeat: MBA Polymers Raises $25 Million, Solar Components Gets $2.8 Million
• EU Could Turn Google, Facebook Into Privacy Felons
• LifeSize Introduces Modular HD Video Conferencing Bridge
• Apple.com Confirms New iLife, Macbook Air
• State of the Internet: Mobile Web's Explosive Growth
• Oh! Oh! Even Linden Lab Founder Is Leaving

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Do iPhone or Android Users Watch More Video? (And Other Video Trends)	Top
Mobile video optimization firm Bytemobile has just released its most recent "Mobile Minute Metrics" report, a look at wireless users' video consumption trends and behavior based on metrics from a cross-section of nearly 2 billion Bytemobile customers in 58 countries around the world.
U.S. Leads With Attack Traffic, Not Broadband Speed	Top
Every quarter, content delivery network Akamai delivers a State of the Internet report looking at the Internet in terms of traffic, speed and connectivity. The latest report shows that the rest of the world is continuing to outpace the U.S. in terms of speed, while the U.S. becomes the leading source of "attack traffic" worldwide.
Google Won't Resume Its Street View Wi-Fi Collection	Top
Google won't be resuming its use of Street View cars to collect information about Wi-Fi networks. So says the fine print of the Canadian Office of Privacy Commissioner's statement today, that as we reported earlier , found that Google had violated Canadians' privacy.
Cal State Bans Students From Using Online Note-Selling Service	Top
As an undergraduate at Sacramento State, Ryan Stevens founded NoteUtopia in order to provide a mechanism for students to buy, sell, and share their university course notes. Stevens graduated last spring and NoteUtopia officially launched in August. But less than six weeks into the startup's history, NoteUtopia has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California State University system, charging that the company violates a provision of the state education code.
Red Hat CEO: Software Vendor Model Is Broken	Top
Speaking at Interop New York, Red Hat CEO derided the current model of selling commercial software
The New Mac OS X: What Apple Has in Store for Business	Top
As Mac sales grow, more find their way into businesses
Click Fraud Incidence Shoots Up in Q3	Top
More than 20 percent of clicks on pay-per-click (PPC) ads in the third quarter were unintended or malicious, resulting in wasted marketing money that drew website visitors with no interest on the product or service advertised and no intention to buy.
Why Silicon Valley Won't Be Detroit for Green Carmakers	Top
We don't hear "death of Detroit" stories as often now as we did a year ago. When GM and Chrysler plunged into bankruptcy and the entire U.S. industry laid off tens of thousands of workers in one year, the effects on an already battered Detroit region were dire. And they led to a rash of stories that Detroit was done with. Many predicted that the new, green auto industry of the future would be built around the electronics expertise of Silicon Valley. EV hub? A June piece in the  San Jose Mercury News , "Silicon Valley becoming a hub of electric vehicles," argued that following Tesla Motors' IPO, the area's early adopters and its expertise in information technology made it a logical place for new electric-car companies. NPR boldly pronounced, "The new automobile of the 21st century is likely to benefit from the culture of Silicon Valley, where people are used to taking a chip, a cell or an idea and working on it until it becomes something big." We've thought about it for a year, and discussed it with many people. And we don't believe it. Silicon Valley is the wrong place to build an auto industry, for three main reasons. Long cycles, faraway profits First, the entire Valley is built around quick-turn invention and monetization. Consider famously successful startups like eBay, Google, and Facebook. None required more than a good idea, a few desks, some computers, and smart software coders. That's the antithesis of a car company. These days, it takes $1 billion or more to design, engineer, test, certify, and launch a brand-new vehicle. And that takes roughly five years. We've never felt that venture capitalists and startup automakers were a good match. A new automaker or even a new brand can take more than a decade to break even (despite CEO Elon Musk's claim that Tesla Motors was profitable for a single month last year). Ten years on, most venture-funded firms have long since either been killed off or sold for parts, or broken even and become self-sustaining and profitable enterprises. Wrong kind of engineers Second, while Silicon Valley is replete with electrical and electronics engineers, the bulk of them are skilled at microelectronics. But integrated circuits for consumer electronics are very different from the large-scale electric machinery—high-voltage battery packs, electric motors of 100 kilowatts or more, and vehicle-grade power electronics—that electric vehicles require. Silicon Valley may have proficient coders oozing out of every condo complex, but it lacks—and isn't likely to develop—large numbers of engineers with the right mix of automotive mechatronics and high-voltage systems skills. Tesla Motors admitted as much on its recent plant tour (pictured). Executives confirmed that the company recruits literally all over the world for engineers with the right mix of experience, including from England's ample supply of Formula 1 race-car engineers. Painful place to build things Finally, California is an expensive and highly regulated place for companies to locate, especially if they manufacture physical goods. And in volume automaking, it's all about keeping costs below revenues. The state has rules, requirements, and laws that simply aren't found elsewhere—especially in the largely Southern, non-union states that lavishly subsidized green-field sites to attract plants built by BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Those rules impose both a time and a cost burden. But it gets worse. After half a century of explosive growth propelled by the success of Silicon Valley startups, the San Francisco Bay Area is now very densely populated. That means factories are no longer the highest and best use for large tracts of land. Office parks or dense residential development simply yield a better return. Sans Tesla, the likely fate of the Fremont plant may have been to be torn down for office parks and condos. Then there's the cost of living. The average price of a single-family house in Palo Alto, Tesla's headquarters town, is over one million dollars—hardly par for the industry globally. When even Stanford University has to build hundreds of housing units to attract everyone from young professors to assistant athletic coaches, startups face huge challenges in luring talented workers from other areas. But what of Tesla? Ah, but isn't Tesla Motors the prototype for this fabled new auto industry in the Valley? Funded by Silicon Valley venture capital, the company is now headquartered in the foothills just above Stanford University, in an old Hewlett-Packard building no less. Nonetheless, Tesla still has to play by the same rules as the rest of the auto industry. If it truly intends to grow into an independent global automaker—a goal most analysts think is close to impossible—it faces the same high costs. The company developed its groundbreaking Roadster smartly, by adapting and reusing large portions of an existing car—the Lotus Elise sports car—and outsourcing much of that work to Lotus itself, along with the manufacturing (in the U.K.). Tesla confined itself to designing, testing, and assembling the Roadster's battery pack and some other electronic components. They've recently brought more of that work in-house in their new facility. More volume means in-house assembly But total Roadster production over three or four model years will number in the low thousands, a level at which outsourcing makes economic sense. According to auto manufacturing guru James Harbour, outsourcing only makes sense to volumes of 15,000 to 25,000 cars per year. After that, it's simply cheaper to set up your own factory. That's why Tesla acquired a factory in Fremont, California, from Toyota earlier this year. The Japanese company had inherited the plant after GM pulled out of the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. partnership that had jointly operated the plant, most recently building Toyota Corollas and Pontiac Vibes. It was also the last surviving auto manufacturing plant in the state. Tesla says it will build and sell 50,000 Model S luxury sports sedans a year, as well as building battery packs and adapting vehicles for other makers. Its powertrain is currently used in the Smart Electric Drive and the Mercedes-Benz A-Class E-Cell, and Toyota is paying it $60 million to provide powertrains for an electric version of its RAV4 crossover. Brand survives, factory moves? If Tesla survives as a company, its headquarters and even manufacturing may stay put. Most analysts feel a more likely scenario is that the brand is acquired by another carmaker, in which case, manufacturing will likely migrate elsewhere. Maybe not right away, but almost certainly when Tesla wants to build a $15,000 or $20,000 electric car that will sell in the hundreds of thousands of units. Around 2020, say? Tesla's headquarters might remain in the Valley. That's a major part of its brand image, and most automakers have outposts there to keep current on innovations in microelectronics, telematics, and social media. But we'd be shocked if the Fremont factory is still building cars 20 years hence. Fisker, Ford, and GM It's worth comparing Tesla to Fisker Automotive, another venture-funded startup. Fisker says it will build up to 15,000 of its first car, the 2011 Karma plug-in hybrid sports sedan. That's the right number for outsourcing; indeed, the Karma will be assembled in Finland by Valmet. For its planned second car, Fisker too is taking over a former GM plant. But this one is in Delaware, a far cheaper location. More importantly, Tesla and Fisker are still tiny startups. So is Coda, which plans to open a vehicle assembly plant for what it says will be up to 14,000 electric cars a year in Benicia, on the northeast corner of San Francisco Bay. Plus ca change… General Motors and Ford are now hiring hundreds of engineers to work on hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and electric vehicles, like the 2011 Chevrolet Volt and the 2012 Ford Focus Electric. And they're not doing it in Silicon Valley. They're doing it in Michigan, just where they always have: the GM Technical Center in Warren, and the Ford headquarters complex in Dearborn. Sure, their designers and engineers visit Silicon Valley to do deals with startups in areas like apps that will connect their cars to the world of always-on information. But then they take the apps back home to where cars are built. In other words, we suspect that the new, clean, green auto industry in the U.S. will be pretty much where the old, dirty, gas-guzzling one was. That would be … Detroit. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. Written by John Voelcker, this article originally appeared on Green Car Reports , one of VentureBeat's editorial partners. Are you a green executive or entrepreneur? If so, sign up now for GreenBeat 2010 — the year's seminal conference on the smart grid — November 3-4 at Stanford University . World leaders in smart grid initiatives will debate how the new "Super Grid" is creating huge opportunities in cars, energy storage, and renewables. GreenBeat 2010 is hosted by VentureBeat and SSE Labs of Stanford University. Go here for full conference details and to apply for the 2010 Innovation Competition. Register by October 22nd and save 30%. Tags: automakers, car manufacturing, Corolla, Detroit, electric cars, electric vehicles, Focus Electric, green cars, Karma, Lotus Elise, silicon valley, Volt Companies: Bmw, Chrysler, eBay, Facebook, Fisker, GM, Google, Hewlett Packard, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Lotus, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Pontiac, Stanford, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagon
Live From Cupertino, Part One: Apple Refreshes Its iLife Suite	Top
Steve Jobs touted the Mac ecosystem today at an event where Apple is introducing its latest line-up of products. Speaking at a press conference at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., the chief executive of Apple said the momentum behind the Mac is gathering steam. The company says there are now 50 million Mac users in the world, reflecting dramatic growth for the company in the last five years. Tim Cook, chief operating officer, said that Apple sold $22 billion worth of Macs in the past year. That revenue alone would make Apple No. 110 on the Fortune 500 if the Mac business were a stand-alone company. In fiscal year 2010, Apple sold 13.7 million Macs, or three times as many as five years earlier. The year-over-year growth rate for Macs is 27 percent, compared to 11 percent for the PC, according to market researcher IDC. The Mac has now outgrown the market 18 quarters in a row. "The momentum of the Macintosh has never been more," Cook said. Apple is introducing a new version of its iLife multimedia suite, with upgrades to subprograms such as iPhoto. You can now easily share photos on Facebook from within iPhoto. You can also email photos to friends within iPhoto as well. There are new ways to print books, letters, and play slide shows as well with themes such as the holidays. It has also refreshed its iMovie suite so that it's easier to edit videos. You can grab the audio track of a video and raise the volume throughout a video as you want. It's now much easier to create a professional-looking video with tools such as better captions, credits, music tracks, and easy-editing tools. The new version of GarageBand, a music creation app, has more piano and guitar lessons. You can now redo the different audio streams within a band's performance, fixing the guitar portion of a band performance with something called "groove matching." It analyzes the rhythm of the drums and applies that rhythm to all the other instruments playing. It's like an "automatic spellchecker for bad rhythm." The GarageBand program has a feature where you can play alongside a great concert pianist. The program will compare your performance to the real musician's and show you where you missed the notes. It will add up your score at the end. Some 5 million people are using GarageBand now, Jobs said. The iLife '11 suite is free with every new Mac, and upgrades are $49. It is available today. Tags: mac Companies: Apple People: Steve Jobs
Apple Announces iLife '11 With New iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand	Top
Apple today announced the latest version of its flagship software suite, iLife '11, at its "Back to the Mac" event in Cupertino. The suite includes 2011 versions of iPhoto, iMovie, Garageband, and more. Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller demonstrated the new features in iPhoto '11, which seems to be taking some cues from iPad applications with its new fullscreen mode. He showed off the new places view, which plots your photos on a world map using GPS information. iPhoto '11 also includes some new slideshow views, one of which looks like a 3D tour through a map featuring your photos. Schiller admitted that the new iPhoto album view looks like the photo albums seen on the iPad. You'll now be able to pull in photos from Flickr. Emailing photos has also gotten easier, as you'll now be able to send photos directly from within the application. iPhoto '11 also features increased sharing options, including the ability to post photos on Facebook and see comments from within the app. Schiller also demonstrated the new project view in iPhoto, which looks a lot like iBooks with its wooden bookshelf. He showed off how you can easily create professional-looking photo books and have them shipped off to friends from the app. You'll also be able to order cards using your photos with actual letterpressing, for an extra elegant touch. This post is still being updated, please refresh for updates. Tags: Garageband, iLife, iLife '11, imovie, iPhoto Companies: Apple People: Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs
Kontiki Raises $10.7M to Give Each Company Its Own YouTube	Top
Kontiki, a provider of Web-based video publishing software for companies, announced today that it has raised $10.7 million in its second round of funding led by MK Capital, New World Ventures and Cross Creek Capital. Kontiki gives companies a way to publish and stream video content, much like YouTube, within an internal network by using peer-to-peer technology similar to torrent programs like BitTorrent. Instead of hosting entire videos on remote databases, users looking to watch a live stream or video pull little bits of data from machines across the company to speed up the process. Kontiki provides companies with both a way to access static video, like YouTube, and stream live video content like company meetings. Because the service uses peer-to-peer technology, rather than traditional video hosting sites like YouTube, its video transmission speed automatically scales to how large the company is, said Eric Armstrong, chief executive officer of Kontiki. That means companies don't have to buy additional servers if they continue to grow — as soon as they add a new machine for a new employee, it automatically increases the power of the network. The funding is pegged to help further develop their Web-based video publishing service, with which Kontiki hopes to triple their user base of more than 1 million enterprise customers. Enterprise video publishing looks to be about a $1.5 billion market, Armstrong said. Most company networks aren't built to handle large-scale data transmission like video — just "burst-y" transmissions like email and messaging, he said. That's where the idea for Kontiki came in when the technology was originally developed in 2000 as part of infrastructure provider VeriSign. Kontiki was later spun out of VeriSign in May 2008. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has raised $15.7 million in two rounds of funding to date, and has 35 employees. [Photo: dpsstyles] Tags: BitTorrent, enterprise video, peer-to-peer, video publishing Companies: Kontiki, YouTube People: Eric Armstrong
On the GreenBeat: MBA Polymers Raises $25 Million, Solar Components Gets $2.8 Million	Top
Here's the cleantech stories we're following today on the GreenBeat: Japanese manufacturer Solar Frontier has signed an agreement to develop IBM-designed thin-film solar cells , CNET reports. The copper, zinc, tin, sulfur and selenium modules have 9.6 percent efficiency — less than other thin-film and silicon photovoltaic options — but is made from more abundant ingredients. Solar Components has raised $2.8 million of an expected $4.9 million in equity . The company makes a portable, waterproof device called Joos (pictured) that can charge phones, cameras or even low-wattage heaters with solar  power. Recycling engineering plastics company MBA Polymers announced it has raised $25 million in an equity funding round co-led by Balderton Capital and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. China wants to put 5 million electric cars on the road by 2020 — that's a rate of 200,000 cars a year, the China Car Times reports. HSBC estimates that to be 35 percent of all electric cars around the world, Fortune writes. The government has put $17 billion into developing charging station infrastructure and offering incentives for electric car buyers. Envision has reached an agreement with GM to install its solar car charging "trees" at GM dealerships selling the Chevrolet Volt , the Los Angeles Times reports. PowerSecure announced $18 million in new projects it has been awarded , $14 million of which is in projects for IDG Systems. The company makes smart grid and energy infrastructure solutions for utilities. Constellation Energy announced it will deploy a new 5.2-megawatt solar photovoltaic power system to serve a company facility in West Deptford, New Jersey. SunPower will supply the panels, and also design and build a system. Constellation Energy will finance, own, operate and maintain the system, and chemicals company Johnson Matthey will purchase electricity produced by the installation under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Are you a green executive or entrepreneur? If so, sign up now for GreenBeat 2010 — the year's seminal conference on the smart grid — November 3-4 at Stanford University . World leaders in smart grid initiatives will debate how the new "Super Grid" is creating huge opportunities in cars, energy storage, and renewables. GreenBeat 2010 is hosted by VentureBeat and SSE Labs of Stanford University. Go here for full conference details and to apply for the 2010 Innovation Competition. Register by October 22nd and save 30%. Tags: car charging, charging stations, China, CZTS, electric cars, Joos, Smart Grid, Solar, solar chargers, thin film solar, Volt Companies: balderton capital, Chevrolet, Constellation Energy, Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, Envision, GM, HSBC, IDG Systems, Johnson Matthey, MBA Polymers, PowerSecure, Solar Components, Solar Frontier, SunPower
EU Could Turn Google, Facebook Into Privacy Felons	Top
Lawsuits against companies such as Google and Facebook for breaching privacy rules would become even more likely under new rules being considered by the European Commission, along with criminal sanctions and fines. European regulators have been far more active on privacy concerns than U.S. authorities.
LifeSize Introduces Modular HD Video Conferencing Bridge	Top
Video conferencing company LifeSize today announced the LifeSize Bridge 2200, an HD video conferencing product. The Austin, Texas-based company (now a division of Logitech) says that because the 16-port product is modular, it should enable businesses using it to scale their video conferencing needs as required.
Apple.com Confirms New iLife, Macbook Air	Top
Somebody jumped the gun at Apple's official Discussions page early this morning, adding new sections for iMovie '11, iPhoto '11 and GarageBand '11. There's also one called "MBA (Need official name)" which means a new MacBook Air is all but certain at today's event.
State of the Internet: Mobile Web's Explosive Growth	Top
In 1999, it was the rapid growth of wired web services that was the top story. Fast-forward to today, and it is all about the demand for the mobile Internet (and its subset, the mobile Web), which is upending all expectations and predictions.
Oh! Oh! Even Linden Lab Founder Is Leaving	Top
Four months after CEO Mark Kingdon left the San Francisco-based Linden Labs -- the company behind once hot virtual world, Second Life -- interim CEO and founder Phil Rosedale is leaving the company to work on his new company, LoveMachine, which is working on collaboration software.

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