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Google has revamped its ad server technology to help itself and small publishers monetize ads on their sites.

The upgrades include more detailed forecasting data to explain which ads are valuable and where publishers’ revenues are coming from. Google also released a new application programming interface that lets publishers build their own apps to handle sales and workflow. Publishers can also open up ad space to bids from multiple networks.

Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion two years ago to refine the way it shows relevant ads to users and to help advertisers optimize their spending across the web. Since then, the search giant has been pushing more aggressively into both display and mobile advertising, buying display advertising startup Teracent and agreeing to buy AdMob last fall.

This announcement also comes on the heels of a major change to the way Google targets ads on partner sites. Typically, when Google displays an ad on a partner site, it takes data from the search engine referral to help target the ad. So, for instance, if a user gets to a golf web site by searching for “golf shop Atlanta,” those keywords will be used to pick an ad. Google now factors in a few hours of search history to target ads, instead of a single query.

Advertising on partner sites are a significant revenue source for Google. The company’s AdSense program helped generate $2.04 billion, or 31 percent of Google’s total revenues, during the last quarter of 2009. That was up 21 percent from the same time a year before.

Tags: ad server

Companies: DoubleClick, Google

We’ve written a lot about the biggest battle raging in Hollywood today: Redbox vs. the Studios. Today, Redbox is following Netflix’s lead, announcing that it has entered into an agreement with Warner Bros. that will, among other things, put a 28-day window in effect for new releases.

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Battle of Home Video

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Although box office sales are bigger than ever, studios have been watching the once booming home video market shrink. As we discussed in December, part of this market contraction is blamed on the availability of online rental services like Netflix and DVD kiosks like Redbox.

Unlike Blockbuster and Netflix, who often make big purchasing buys directly from the studios, Redbox has often purchased many of the DVDs that stock its kiosks from retail outlets like Walmart and Target.

Thanks in part to studio pressure, more retailers (including Walmart), are putting limits on how many copies of a new DVD release can be purchased at a time. The idea being, if studios can lower Redbox’s access to its titles, the company will have to consider making a deal.

And that’s exactly what has happened. Redbox’s new agreement will mean that when it comes to Warner Bros. titles, the company will be able to get more copies and better pricing on the product. In return, it will not offer new releases for four weeks after “street date.” This also will give Redbox access to Warner Bros.’ Blu-ray library, which it’s testing in certain markets.

Redbox is also ending its lawsuit that it filed against Warner Home Video in August.

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Who Really Wins?

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The new agreement, which will be implemented during March (just in time for Warner Bros.’ home video release of the Oscar-nominated and boffo box office hit The Blind Side), is scheduled to run through January 31, 2012.

Clearly, the biggest winner in this agreement is Warner Bros. As one of the largest players in the home video market that boasts an incredibly strong back catalog, the studio has proven that it certainly has the muscle to get what it wants.

Redbox, too, gets itself out of a legal battle and will be able to actually get content more efficiently and for less money. Even if you love Redbox, you have to admit, the fact that the player with almost 20% of the home rental market is keeping its kiosks full by buying retails is, well, not exactly the mark of professionalism.

Clearly, for consumers, this is a blow — at least for those who have relied on getting new releases from Redbox. It will be interesting to see if other studios join in with this push to move release windows and rental windows apart.

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A Return to a Pre-DVD Era, in Reverse

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I have to appreciate the irony that the movie studios are now fighting for the same model they broke themselves at the end of the 1990s. During most of VHS’s lifespan, studios did not make many of their catalog titles directly available to home users. Instead, video rental shops could buy the films at a list price of between $80 and $120 or so.

In the late 1990s, more studios started expanding their home video releases, oftentimes coinciding with the same day a film was available to rent. With the advent of DVDs, the VHS rental agreement window disappeared and Joe Consumer and Blockbuster could both buy DVDs on the same day.

The rapid drop in DVD prices quickly led many people to abandon traditional video rentals until services like Netflix and Redbox were able to make it cheaper and more convenient.

So excuse me if I laugh at how, 13 years after the studios ended the agreement between rental outlets and studios to delay the home video sell date to X days after the rental window, that they are now imposing the reverse rule on the rental companies.

Meanwhile, some studios like Disney are looking at shortening their theatrical distribution windows, meaning that films would be available to buy or rent even sooner.

What do you think of all of this rental nonsense? Are you a buyer or renter? Let us know!

Tags: dvd rentals, movie rentals, netflix, redbox, rental business, warner bros

Just as it looked like Amazon was about to achieve an iTunes-style lock on the e-book marketplace, the impending arrival of Apple’s iPad seems to have emboldened book publishers. After a pricing dispute caused all Macmillan titles to disappear off Amazon’s virtual shelves, other publishers joined the pricing revolt, demanding greater flexibility in setting prices on their wares. According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has apparently settled the first of these disputes by capitulating.

According to the Journal’s report, Amazon will give up on its $9.99 pricing target for e-books, and allow Macmillan greater flexibility to set the rates for its content. The new prices may be as much as $5.00 higher. Although Amazon had announced that it had no choice but to concede given what it termed Macmillan’s “monopoly” over its content, the publisher’s books were slow to reappear in the retailer’s site. That apparently changed over the weekend following a full settlement of the dispute on Friday.

Unfortunately for Amazon, it appears that Macmillan will be the first of many publishers that seek to renegotiate terms, as at least two others (Harper Collins and Hachette) have voiced their intention of doing so. The trigger for the sudden uprising, according to nearly every report on the  matter, is the impending arrival of Apple’s iPad, as Apple has negotiated deals that allow publishers to retain significant control over e-book prices. As we noted in our earlier coverage, this is a complete role reversal compared to the dispute over downloadable music pricing.

For Amazon, it all has to be a major disappointment. After remaining relatively circumspect about Kindle sales, the company allowed itself a bit of back-patting after both hardware and e-book sales boomed over the holidays. Its primary competitor, Sony, appeared to be struggling in comparison, and newcomers to the e-book reader market appeared to have a bad case of first-generation hardware blues, something that Amazon had already put in its past. But the mere threat of Apple releasing a competing product seems to have encouraged Amazon’s key suppliers (the publishers) to think different.

The ironclad legitimacy of this slide can’t be confirmed, but considering what we know and what we’ve heard about T-Mobile USA’s plans for the next few months, we can totally buy what we’re seeing here. The PowerPoint masterpiece — which showed up on a PPCGeeks forum thread recently — has the midrange Android-powered Motorola Zeppelin as the “CLIQ XT” with a target launch of March 10, giving customers already flush with choices yet another way to get their Google on. Next, the Nokia “Nuron” (which looks an awful lot like a 5230 to us) is being billed as a “low-cost touchscreen” with 3G and Ovi Store access for a March 17 date with destiny, and finally, the mighty HD2 — which we already know is coming to T-Mobile — is said to be ready come March 24. Now, don’t get us wrong, the HD2 is a helluva phone — but if Windows Mobile 7 is really unveiled in a few days at MWC like everyone expects, that’s going to make the launch of a high-end 6.5 device just a little anticlimactic.

T-Mobile getting Moto CLIQ XT, HTC HD2, Nokia Nuron next month? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In January, Google went public with news that some of its systems had been hacked, along with those of a number of US-based companies. The attacks had targeted both accounts maintained by political activists and commercial code, and Google pointed the finger straight at China, vowing to change its entire approach to business in that country. But a report now suggests that the company is also looking to beef up its internal defenses to prevent a repeat of the attacks.

The Washington Post is reporting that Google has started negotiations with the US National Security Agency about a collaborative effort to analyze the attack and figure out how best to prevent a recurrence. The Post is citing confidential sources, as the deal isn’t final and, even if it were, it’s unlikely that Google would seek to publicize it.

For starters, both organizations have already been the target of many complaints by privacy advocates, the NSA for its domestic surveillance efforts, Google for its data retention policies. The combination of the two would clearly make the advocates far more uneasy, and might help them make their case with the wider public. Meanwhile, as the report notes, private companies have often been loath to share information about their proprietary systems with the government for a variety of reasons.

That may explain why the negotiations have been going slowly, as the NSA would clearly need access to and understanding of Google’s infrastructure in order to fully evaluate the attacks and future risks. And that’s precisely the sort of proprietary information that Google is presumably reluctant to provide anyone with—even a highly secretive organization like the NSA.

Last week, the people in charge of CERN, the European physics lab that is responsible for the highest energy particle collider on the planet, met to decide a course of action for the coming years. Faced with the reality that equipment upgrades would be necessary before the Large Hadron Collider could reach its full, 14TeV energy levels, the managers decided to plan for a long run at half the rated maximum before shutting it down for extensive work.

According to the CERN news page, 7.0TeV collisions (meaning each of the collider’s proton beams running at 3.5TeV) are within the current operational bounds of the machine. But the superconducting hardware that distributes power to the the magnets that control the beams haven’t been fully updated. This hardware was responsible for the failure that shut the LHC down after its short initial run, so its limitations should be fairly clear to the CERN staff. Replacing this equipment requires that the LHC be warmed up from its normal operating temperatures, which are near absolute zero. That, in turn, requires major downtime.

So, run a machine at the highest energies yet achieved, or shut it down for a long time in order to go even higher? The decision was to perform an initial run at 7TeV until a specific data target was reached, which should take 18 months to two years. At that point, the LHC would be shut down for upgrades that could take a year or more. Science is reporting that the delay has caused Fermilab administrators to reevaluate plans to shut the Tevatron down.

The initial run of the machine allowed researchers to calibrate their instruments on known particles—a scientist who works on the ATLAS detector told Ars that the initial data was “absolutely beautiful.” Dealing with extended operational data should give the grid computing system that analyzes the results a full workout, and may even turn up some predicted particles that lie outside of the reach of the Tevatron’s energies. Next week, we’ll be taking a tour of Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that will include a teleconference with scientists at CERN, so expect more from the world of particle physics soon.

On Monday, February 1, 2010, Walmart put into effect a DVD purchase cap on new releases, limiting customers to no more than 5 DVD new release purchases at a time. It’s a decision that could make it impossible for Redbox — the enemy of the entertainment industry — to keep their kiosks stocked with new releases.

Walmart’s newly enforced restrictions are similar to those that Target began to enforce back in December 2009.

Both companies assert that the rules are meant to be consumer-friendly, ensuring that more customers have access to new releases, but it is widely accepted that these decisions were motivated by studio pressure and designed to thwart RedBox’s ability to stock new releases in their 19,000 plus kiosks.

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The Trouble with New Release Rentals

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As DVD sales of new releases plummet, studios have made efforts to turn things around. The idea that seems to have the most traction right now is to create an extended delay between the date a new release becomes available for purchase and the date that consumers can rent the same title.

Given that the success of low cost rental services like Netflix and Redbox is contingent upon having vast quantities of titles to deliver to customers, studios are seeking to sell DVDs to these retailers at lower prices in exchange for the services delaying new release rentals by around 30 days.

Netflix ultimately took the bait and signed an agreement with Warner Bros. Now Netflix customers will have to wait 28 days to rent newly released Warner Bros. flicks. The suggested payoff for customers is that once the titles become available, they will have access to more copies and are less likely to encounter unavailable titles. Netflix benefits by being able to buy movies in bulk from the studio at substantially lower prices.

With the Warner Bros. deal in place, expectations are that other studios will follow suit and structure a similar relationship with Netflix.

Redbox, however, has shown no signs of responding to pressure from movie studios. They have filed lawsuits against Warner Home Video, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, and Twentieth Century Fox with the goal of forcing the studios to sell them new releases on the day they become available.

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Will Redbox Concede?

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In a BusinessWeek article, Adams Media Research President Tom Adams estimates that Redbox gets about 40% of new release DVDs from retailers like Walmart and Target. Clearly the newly enforced limitations will make it much more for difficult for Redbox to supply their ubiquitous kiosks with new releases.

The relationship between Redbox and studios is tenuous at best, but it appears that they’re being backed in to a corner that might force them to concede to the demands of studios.

In an email communication, Redbox’s Director of Public Relations Marci Maul tells us that the company is “closely monitoring this situation as these limits were just recently put into practice.”

While that tidbit of information doesn’t tell us too much about their strategy moving forward, we have to presume that the company will continue to do everything in its power to secure new releases. Some reports estimate that 100% of Redbox’s business is dependent on new releases. A 28 day new release delay could put a significant dent in their sales, which means we foresee the fight forging on.

On the flip side, NCR — which operates Blockbuster Express kiosks — is said to be negotiating with studios and could have deals in place later this year. Alex Camera with NCR told BusinessWeek, “We have the same challenges in securing DVDs … We are working closely with the studios to find a solution. My intention is to have agreements by spring [or] early summer.”

[Img credit: Eddie Does Japan]

Tags: DVDs, entertainment, Film, movie rentals, netflix, redbox

If you find yourself always tearing the wrinkled sheets off your bed to use as a makeshift projector screen, it’s time to upgrade. Make this portable screen on the cheap that stashes away in a closet til the next time you need it.

The DIY portable projector screen project over at Instructables can be whipped together in about an hour, and costs next to nothing to assemble. All you need is a white sheet, some eyelets, a few screw-in hooks, and about 12 feet of PVC pipe.

There’s only five steps involved in making the screen:

1. Decide what size you want. Mine is 5 feet wide by 6 feet tall.
2. Cut and sew the top and sides. Leave a couple inches extra on each side so you can fold it over and sew a seam.
3. Insert eyelets. One on each side of the top.
4. Sew in PVC pipe. This is to make it hang flat and straight, and to make it easy to roll up and store. Just fold the bottom over the PVC, crease the sheet, take out the pipe and sew all the way across. Then slide the pipe in and sew the sides shut.
5. Put the hooks in your ceiling. I put some in my living room, my bedroom, and another bedroom. They’re hardly noticeable so I just leave them up there all the time.

Using a bedsheet for this project is a super-inexpensive way to get the job done, and you can get them everywhere from Target to Goodwill. If you’re looking for a sturdier material, though, try using Tyvek in place of the sheet

If you’re feeling adventurous, you could cut the length of PVC pipe in half before sewing it into the sheet—then you can fold it in half before storing it. One of Instructable’s commenters also suggests adding a second piece of PVC pipe to the top edge for added stability, and to make sure the screen hangs straight.

How would you tweak this project to make it easier, or to make the screen even more user-friendly? Brainstorm in the comments.

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Filed under: Gaming, Freeware, Developer, iPhone, App Store

The other week I said a lot of good things about Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but one of the great things about games on the iPhone is that they don’t all have to be epic masterpieces. Such is the case with the free Bankshot [iTunes link], which is a simple and fun one-hit game that was created in just 36 hours: the only goal is to bounce a little neon “puck” into a target that gets placed on different sides of the screen. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s the perfect kind of game to just pull up and play when you only need a few minutes of distraction.

The game does have a little bit of hidden depth (you can score more points by bouncing the puck off the walls more times before it hits the target, but if you go more than four bounces, the game is over), but essentially, this is an addictive little pick-up-and-play game (and it’s even OpenFeint enabled, if you’re into that sort of thing). The game is free with ads, but they were never distracting or in the way. If you want a quick arcade hit to play during your next few iPhone breaks, definitely pick it up.

TUAWReview: Bankshot delivers a quick hit of fun originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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