Windows Live SkyDrive Doubles Storage to 1GB, Still Can’t Keep Up With Gmail

Microsoft doubled the online storage consumers can get for free in Windows Live SkyDrive. It’s hard to get excited about that when Gmail is already giving me 2.9 GB of storage, with more on the way—4GB by the end of the month, and 6GB by early January, according to one estimate.

Keep that free storage coming. We’ll use it.

MuseStorm Debuts Widget Engagement Platform

Silicon Valley/Israel based MuseStorm will launch a new end-to-end widget syndication platform today at the DEMO conference.

The new offering which MuseStorm is officially dubbing a “content engagement platform” provides four widget syndication aspects: Authoring, Distribution, Analytics & Monetization.

The highlight of the platform is the authoring functionality. First, it provides non-programmers the ability to develop rich media (audio, video, photo, text) widgets. Second, MuseStorm’s platform instantly exports the “source” into a variety of Web formats, including MySpace, Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes, PageFlakes, etc. Desktop widget export currently features Windows executable, but support for Google, Yahoo, and Mac will be added in the near future. Updated are propagated seamlessly to the universe of deployed widgets, regardless of format.

The distribution aspect of the platform includes Web and Desktop widgets as noted above and will be expanded to IM and mobile. From the analytics standpoint, the MuseStorm platform provides distribution and user interaction analytics which should help publishers optimize their offerings. Publishers can monetize their widgets by integrating ads using advanced features such as event triggers, location of the ad within the widget, and more.

MuseStorm is targeting its offering toward high-end publishers requiring a complete widget strategy. This is in contrast to offerings by Widgetbox and Clearspring which are geared at publishers that are in need specifically of distribution power.

Several publishers have already given the nod to MuseStorm’s new platform. These include Simon & Schuster (BookVideos), CBS (The ShowBuzz), and even MicroSoft which launched a Halo 3 FaceBook app powered by MuseStorm.

Founded in 2005, MuseStorm is based in Sunnyvale with R&D in Or-Yehuda, Israel. Dr. Yossi Vardi provided seed funding in the low six digits. In July 2007 $1M in Series A was provided by Elron (NASDAQ: ELRN). This is Elron’s first Internet investment.

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Sketchcasting - Another Weapon In The Blogging Arsenal

A new site called Sketchcast launched moments ago - it’s a tool for bloggers and others to create a presentation to express an idea using a sketchpad and (optionally) a †sound recording, and then embed it into a website. Sketchcasts can also be subscribed in iTunes and RSS readers via a feed.

The video below shows an overview of what it is, using the tool itself.

The idea for the product first came from Richard Ziade in a July blog post where he proposed the term and the general need for such a tool. Ziade isn’t associated with the new company around the tool, but they give him credit for inventing the idea. They also say he gave them his full permission to take the idea and run with it. Which is exactly what they did.

Apple EU iPhone deal expected

Now that Apple has summoned the UK press to a London briefing next Tuesday, it looks like the iPhone announcement is imminent. There are no other significant details about the event at its flagship Regent Street outlet, but I know the venue and it is only big enough for a medium-sized launch with about 200 people. This suggests it could just be the UK iPhone announcement alone, not the German or French one.

The speculation to date is that the leading 02 carrier will get the contract. A well-placed mobile industry source told me: “02 will get the contract because the iPhone is worth an extra 500,000 customers to them. That will pull them well out in front of any other carrier. Vodafone had talked to Apple but they couldn’t stomach the revenue share deal so walked away.”

That would chime in with two recent hints. First, that O2’s chief executive, Peter Erskine yesterday told the The Times newspaper that he believes revenue sharing with key handset makers is an inevitability: “If sharing revenue brings a bigger pie to the table, then we’ll be happy to share that pie… The revenue-sharing model will play an increasingly important role in the future of converged communications.” That is a major shift in the thinking of any mobile carrier, which tend to protect their networks and revenues like she-wolves.

The second reason why it is probably 02 which has won the iPhone - and not the other likely candidate Vodafone - is that the latter has just launched its own music service, almost certainly as a spoiler for the iPhone/iTunes service. Subscribers to Vodafone’s MusicStation will have access to more than one million songs from major record labels, which they will be able to download directly to their 3G phones for a flat fee of £1.99 a week. However, this will be a rental service, so when customers stop paying the weekly flat fee, their music becomes unplayable. Not a fantastic spoiler to iTunes then.

Lastly, there remains a couple more questions. Whether this will be the 2.5G US-style version of the iPhone or the full-blown 3G version, and whether the phones will appear in stores before Christmas or be launched in the New Year. The latter looks a lot more likely at this stage.

Meanwhile, in the US iPhone sales have increased three-fold, from roughly 9,000 units sold a day to 27,000 units, after the recent $200 price cut, according to a study by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. This is either down to the price cut or to the plethora of free unlocking services which have emerged online, encouraging consumers to try out their existing carrier SIM in the iPhone. Or both.

WTF: Pitzer College Offers “Learning From YouTube” Class

Pitzer College, located in Southern California, is offering a for-credit class called Learning from YouTube this Fall, taught by Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor. The class consists of students watching YouTube videos and then discussing them. They also leave comments on the videos themselves.

One of the students, Darren Grose, says YouTube is “a phenomenon that should be studied…You can learn a lot about American culture and just Internet culture in general.”

Pitzer isn’t known as an intellectual powerhouse among small liberal arts schools (although to be honest I am somewhat biased as I went to a rival school, Claremont McKenna). But this may still be just about the most ridiculous class the school, or any school, has ever offered.

The classes are being recorded and, of course, posted on YouTube. Here’s an example class.

In related news, we recently mentioned that Stanford is offering a class on Facebook. But in Stanford’s case, it is a computer science course that teaches students how to create Facebook applications. It’s not a class where students get college credit for sitting around and watching YouTube.

People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts.

Not much information is included in the results (see image below)- just the name and primary photograph included in the user profile, and users can easily elect to stop search engines from indexing their information by changing their privacy settings.

As Om Malik notes, this is yet another competitive threat in the burgeoning people search scene. We’ve recently covered five new people search engines - Spock, Wink, Zoominfo, WikiYou and PeekYou. All of these services count on the fact that people information is distributed across many different websites and services.

To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

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FEC Determines That Blogs Count As Media

Multiply Lands $16.6 Million Series B

Social network Multiply has taken $16.6 million in Series B funding. The round was led by VantagePoint Venture Partners with Point Judith Capital and Transcosmos Investments also participating.

As part of the deal ex-Chairman of Intermix Media (the original owners of MySpace) David Scott Carlick will join Multiply’s board.

Multiply previously took $6million Series A in July 2006.

Multiply is one of the older social networking sites (it launched in 2003) and has flown under the radar while first MySpace, then Facebook soared; we last covered the site in November 06. Whilst getting little attention Multiply has continued to grow, and at least according to Alexa is now more popular than Bebo, although lower than Orkut or Hi5. Like many of its competitors it appears to have carved out a strong presence outside of the United States, ranking in the top 10 sites visited by internet users in the Philippines (5) and Indonesia (9); 39% of the sites traffic comes from the Philippines.

Google Lands CNN As Exclusive Adsense User

CNN.com and Google have announced an agreement that will see Google’s AdSense become the exclusive text link advertising provider on CNN.com.

The deal will also open up the extensive inventory on CNN.com to Adwords’ advertisers.

Senior VP and GM of CNN.com David Payne said the deal would help deliver relevant ads to CNN users, “enhancing their overall experience on CNN.com.”

Although the deal might not initially sound all that exciting, CNN.com is a top 100 site online according to Alexa, making it one of the most popular media destinations online. That’s a lot of pages and ad inventory for Google to sell ads on, inventory that should pay handsomely for all involved.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, including the length of the agreement, which was described only as “multi-year.”

What Do You Get When You Ask Gmail Fans To Express Email Delivery?

Google asked the question, and found out:

Google received over 1,100 submissions for the collaborative effort.

It reminds me a little bit of Ze Frank’s (what ever happened to him BTW?) Video for Ray project earlier this year. The exercise just goes to prove that tapping into passionate users can deliver; over 1,000 people world wide took time out to video and upload their love of Gmail, with no incentive to do so other than perhaps a 2 second chance of fame. Cheap labor perhaps, but it’s a resource that can and is being tapped.