The Next Net

Ok, Ok. All Of You (even YouTube) Invented Video Overlay Ads “First”
It's not who invented it that counts. It's who makes it popular, and brings advertisers along.

In this week's Disruptors episode, I visit Zink in Waltham, Mass. Zink is a spin-off from Polaroid that has developed an inkless printing technology. The ink is in the paper in the form of special...

YouTube Initiates Monetization Strategy With Transparent Video 'Overlays'
No pre-roll ads here. Smart move.
Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention - Engadget
Some (much-needed) advice for Palm...

For the September cover story of Business 2.0, I put together our second annual list of some of the most disruptive startups on the planet. This really brings things full-circle for me. I started ...

Dalton Caldwell is finally finding his groove. His Sequoia-backed social network, Imeem, started out a couple years ago as a standalone, instant-messaging application. He soon scrapped that in fav...

Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph
"A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet." Yeah, but it's good for business, especially if you can own the social graph like Facebook...

Facebook only opened up its social network to outside applications last May, but already there are 2,960 of them. And the top apps are being snapped up by larger companies. For instance, Slide acq...

Hitwise Intelligence - US: New York Times Select Rumor - Data Perspective
Data showing traffic to NYTimes Select declining and drawing a less desirable demographic than the free NYTimes.com.
Tech...

JibJab has finally launched its "Starring You" series, where you can upload your head into a JibJab animated video (you can see me and my wife shaking it above). This an example of giving average ...

The culture of participation is gaining steam in the gaming arena. Kongregate, a site that lets users upload their own simple Flash video games, announced today that it raised $5 million in a vent...