Last week I was tinkering with Google Adwords to promote the INTV.com domain name sale when something interesting happened. While building the attached ad, Adwords flagged my ad, and the term “Interactive Television” “Internet Television” for review as “Hacking and Cracking”. I suppose a large cadre of malicious makers are paying to dupe iTV searchers, but personally that seems like a reach.

Update: After two dispute processes, my “internet television” ads were approved.

Want more than Over-The-Air TV?

This appears to be UK only for now, however this statement at TVOver.net probably is true:
“the first commercially available set-top box which combines the ability to receive high definition free-to air programming with a raft of Internet capabilities.”

http://www.3view.com/Home.aspx
http://www.3view.com/Images/3view%20Consumer%20Brochure-p3.png

I’ve uncovered some disturbing trends for job seekers recently; even started to receive warning notices from Monster on a few.

There’s the usual… Postal re-mailing, and foreign finance processing scams, but here’s the ugly.. I followed an interested job link this week only to discover it was an ad for a job search service, and for the nominal fee of $10 for a three day pass, I too could apply for this job. Yuck. I won’t mention the nasty-co by name, they don’t deserve the ink-bits, but safe to say, buyers beware.

In the same genre, I’ve also started to see a number of clones of job aggregators. Here, a company puts up a listing, drives traffic to their job board; then they clone their database, exact jobs, exact formula, under another web-brand. Of course Google will bury their juice for such tactics, but these guys get traffic from super job aggregators like Indeed.com, and their spam formulas are still trying to catch up. In my conversations with Indeed on the subject, they are well aware, and in the process of tweaking their methods, so good news is on the way in the job-spam front.

Hope you will join us for the Charlotte area premier of The Last Passport movie. Here is a trailer show a bit about the film. See ya at the show!.

“With ZON’s launch, Portugal will be… the third country in the world to launch 1 Gbps (residential Internet service), after only Japan and South Korea.”
via Light Reading’s Cable Digital News.

Many moons have passed since Ryan and I put the first INTV prototypes together. Our vision was to develop an Internet Television service for the masses. Our foundation, based in part on continuous-play streaming video; something only LiveStation.com seems to have a handle on some 7 years after our efforts.

And so startups and visions sometimes go – into the past.

Moving forward, this week I listed our startup address, the premium domain INTV.com for sale. I’ve hired the fine folks at Moniker.com to represent the sale. And with a few select emails and cross-postings, have let the word out about the listing.

For interested buyers, there is an information page here: domain.intv.com.

And for folks that wonder about my waxing on about our circa 2002 INTV efforts, I’ll simply ask you to remember those times in your life when you were doing something you truly believed in.

For the entrapraneurs in our midst – that do step up the the edge… The journey is the reward. Sacrifice without legend. The experience of experience. These are, more often than not, the past we trade in as we move forward with our lives.

Quick note to pitch an upcoming concert in Winston-Salem. A friend of mine is playing at The Garage in Winston-Salem on July 31st. If you’re in the city, please drop in for a look. Also on the bill – Peter Holsapple & Chris Stamey – Brett Harris – and The Tomahawks. Enjoy.

Click the poster for a larger poster.

“The DynaLine user interface was the most favored interface, ranked most preferred by 61% of users…”

Nice to see the research proves out one of the design principles for our former INTV project.

Early adopters, and early majority for online video services are now tapped out. In the following chart we see from 2008 to 2009, the number of unique viewers actually went down by around 2%. Usage rose, but uniques are flat. To take a shopping-mall analogy, sales, and foot traffic are up, but it’s the same people, and the other half of the city is ignoring the mall.

So the question is – are video products well positioned to attract the rest of the audience. And the answer is no. Your grandmother won’t watch TV on the Internet because it’s basically too much work. One could argue that by the time she breached the learning curve, web video as we know it will be an old-form curiosity – like Word Perfect for DOS.

For those companies trying to reach late majority video users, or trying to re-innovate for next-generation video services there are clear opportunities. But, for the short term YouTube has sucked the life out of web video innovation and left it stalled at the click-happy gates of our soon-to-be past.