Twitter gets a mainstream plug on UK Network TV tomorrow.

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Tomorrow on the Johnathon Ross show, @wossy and @StephenFry will chat about twitter, I caught them chatting about this on twitter a couple of weeks ago about doing this and at the time thought, and tweeted this would be a big deal.

News stories have been broken through citizen journalist for a while now, and the networks have been working out how to manage and prioritise the inbound traffic. But what seems interesting to me is that for a few ‘celebrities’ who are comfortable with the twitter conversations there is a huge opportunity to connect and converse with their audience and fans.

Imogen Heap has been making her latest album whilst blogging, uploading videos and tweeting and its an amazing journey she’s been on. Anyway – back to Johnathon Ross, I’d love to find out if there is a way to track the growth after the show.

UpNext

Just came across UpNext a start-up working in the local mapping and recomendation space. Currently a 4 man outfit in NYC they are doing some very interesting work with 3D maps and hyper local content. Looks great – and seems to be pretty quick on my 3G mobile broadband connection.

I’m out on a trip to NYC in a week from now and looking to meet some early stage companies and get a read on the NYC venture market.

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Advertising Insertion Technology

MirriAd are developing a interesting proposition in the video advertising space. They are doing analysis of video and then digital insertion of branding and product placement. I met Mark Popkiewicz the CEO at the BBC and I’ll follow up to learn more. Here in the UK the product placement market has been getting some confusing messages from the government about if, and how it could be acceptable. From my point of view some of this has to be feasible and infact for production companies could be quite desirable. Perhaps the bigger issue here is the distribution platforms – If we could combine high quality IPTV with these insertion technologies we could provide global content to local audiences with local product placement.

EFF continues its case against the US telecoms industry

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The EFF are continuing a case against the telecoms industry that the US Government has wanted to sweep aside. Problem is the EFF won’t let it.

From Boing Boing:

Remember when the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the NSA had been wiretapping the entire Internet, illegally, with collaboration from the nation’s phone companies? Remember when they sued the phone companies in order to discover the full extent of this illegal, warrantless domestic spying?

Remember when Congress — including both presidential candidates — voted to give the phone companies immunity from prosecution, even though they had clearly broken the law, on the grounds that the president had asked them to? (If the president asked you to shoot someone, would Congress let you off the hook, too?)

Well now EFF is suing to have the immunity — the unconstitutional immunity — overturned. Go EFF! “The immunity law puts the fox in charge of the hen house, letting the Attorney General decide whether or not telecoms like AT&T can be sued for participating in the government’s illegal warrantless surveillance,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “In our constitutional system, it is the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government to determine the scope of the surveillance and rule on whether it is legal, not the executive’s. The Attorney General should not be allowed to unconstitutionally play judge and jury in these cases, which affect the privacy of millions of Americans.”

In the public version of his certification to the court, Attorney General Mukasey asserted that the government had no “content-dragnet” program that searched for keywords in the body of communications. However, the government did not deny the dragnet acquisition of the content of communications. In support of its opposition, EFF provided the court with a summary of thousands of pages of documents demonstrating the broad dragnet surveillance of millions of innocent Americans’ communications. Eight volumes of exhibits accompanied the detailed summary, including eyewitness accounts and testimony under oath.

“We have overwhelming record evidence that the domestic spying program is operating far outside the bounds of the law,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kurt Opsahl. “Intelligence agencies, telecoms, and the Administration want to sweep this case under the rug, but the Constitution won’t permit it.”

Future of Web Apps.

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Today I’m at FOWA in the docklands. Julie Meyer who I work with at Ariadne Capital is on stage @ 15:45 – 16:15 The Future of Entrepreneurship.

Relatated Links

There is a great summary from yesterday here from Benjamin:

http://bendyer.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/day-1-fowa/

Mediatronica does mash-up like you’ve never seen

Eli and the gang at Mediatronica are doing some brilliant work – this time with a video mixer for innerpartysystem. Outstanding.

User generated content affects Apples stock. SEC probes

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cnet reports a CNN ireport story on its user generated site impacted apples stock by 9% yesterday.

Its a really interesting situtaion where the un verified story on a CNN service get picked up by other mainstream media and has a real impact.

Does this mean that mainstream news media cannot even associate its brand with user generated content? If you understand how the iReport system works you realise that until CNN add an ‘ON CNN’ Logo its not been on the network. But in the snack media world we live in someone has seen this and blogged it withoutchecking, and boom – its the story is everywhere and the original poster is going down.

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ITV advertising overlay trial

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Just spotted an article in the Times (News pg.11) about ITV working with Keystream to do real time video analytics and advertising overlays and embedding – don’t see how this will fit with ofcom guidelines regarding editorial and advertising separation though. Perhaps going to be used by ITV to negotiate a more relaxed (and potentially lucrative) advertorial approach. I’ll try to dig out an example from the ITV local website.

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Industry Moves: BBCWW Confirms Microsoft’s Dobson To Run Global Ad Sales

Just picked this up on paid content:

BBC Worldwide has now confirmed Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) UK’s online services group VP Chris Dobson is joining it, as we reported last month. His job title’s a big one – EVP and general manager of global ad sales. Dobson will oversee advertising across TV channels and online including BBC World News, and will sit above both Jonathan Howlett and Mark Gall, who were brought to head digital ads for international and US respectively in November, when BBC.com launched with its controversial advertising. Dobson, who will report to Darren Childs, has a remit to grow advertising income from the BBC’s commercial arm, which reinvests in BBC content. BBC.com made £1.5 million from ads between November and March, and BBCWW plans to grow that significantly.

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InSkin and Adotube

InSkin seem to be doing some interesting work on the video monetisation elements. I have a couple of projects where this could be a really viable approach. I’m going to find out more – anyone used them yet? I just met another company, Adotube at IBC and plan to get to know more about them as well.