Update: Listen to our podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb at TalkCrunch.

Today at Mix07 Microsoft made a number of major announcements, mostly around the recently-released Silverlight (formerly known as Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere). Microsoft presented both new products and a new vision for how services and software will interoperate in the Microsoft and Silverlight ecosystems. Microsoft is providing not only the tools and software but they are complementing it with new services from their Live division. Microsoft have also demonstrated today that their vision is for all browsers and all web users, not just users of Internet Explorer, as a common theme during the keynote presentations was inter-operability with both Firefox and Safari, and working with the Mac OSX platform.

During the keynote the new Expression Studio applications were demonstrated to great effect. These are applications targeted at designers rather than the traditional Microsoft developer crowd, and Microsoft seems to have done a good job of providing a great suite of applications that designers can use to build powerfull web applications on Silverlight. Today also marks the official gold release of Expression Studio.

When Silverlight was first announced two weeks ago, it was all about a platform that could run a subset of XAML to provide graphical and event-driven applications for the web – in short, a competitor to Flash. Today, only 14 days from the original announcement, Microsoft has officially announced that Silverlight will also contain a compact CLR, allowing developers to build desktop like applications on the web in a number of supported programming languages.

The CLR
The biggest part of the announcement today is that Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it.

The most remarkable part of the CLR are its speed and its size. First of all, the full Silverlight download with CLR and everything else will weigh in at around 4MB – which with current broadband penetration is effortless. Second of all the CLR is fast, very very fast. In a demonstration today showing a game of chess routines written in .NET competed against native Javascript routines and the result was a speed difference of orders of magnitude. Developers can simple take their existing Javascript and copy it into Silverlight and have it perform multiple times faster than it does in the native browser environment. Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it – it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.

Multimedia
A lot of the demonstrations of Silverlight technology have dealt with multimedia – particularly online video, and Silverlight has a very strong hand in this area. Online video has traditionally been associated with Flash, and most users are familiar with the constraints that such video has such as quality levels and fullscreen viewing. Using Silverlight you can distribute multimedia as part of the application at quality levels up to 720p (high definition) and also in native full screen (not just a maximized browser screen). The demonstrations shown today were simply gorgeous, and we are finally seeing a web-based video distribution model that can compete with both desktop-based downloads as well as DVD and other offline content.

As with all Silverlight applications, video can be streamed down through IE, Firefox or Safari on both Windows and Mac OSX. If an application is doing just video and audio and doesn’t require the rest of the Silverlight CLR functionality, then the total download including the codecs required to play the stream will be around 2MB (it will be a bit bigger for Mac OSX as it is a universal binary). The install happens automatically, and doesn’t require a restart in IE which will probably result in video content sites being the first major distributors of the Silverlight 1.0 client across browsers. I expect that over time we will see a host of sites, especially those currently serving WMV of other formats into media player embeds, migrate their video serving to Silverlight.

Services
The same video sites that will be switching to Silverlight for content delivery will also want to consider one of the new web services announced by Microsoft today. The service is called Silverlight Streaming and it allows users and developers to host their Silverlight content and apps with Microsoft, taking advantage of their extensive global network of datacenters and their content delivery network. Best of all, this service is free, and while currently it is only in alpha it allows users to upload up to 4GB of content, and to stream up to 1 million minutes of online video delivery at 700kbps, around DVD quality. Starting right now, you can build a total video content site using Silverlight at no cost. The future for this service looks good as they will incorporate Silverlight Streaming with the MSN Video ad network to allow you to easily monetize your video streams and participate in a revenue sharing opportunity with Microsoft while removing your distribution costs. There will also be a premium level of content delivery where you will be able to pay for higher levels of usage – the cost for this service is as yet unknown but expect it to be very low.

Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone – so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well – thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do.

What is next..
In all we should expect to see more services provided by Microsoft as part of the ecosystem. Ray Ozzie today spoke about a vision of services complimenting software – and announcing Silverlight Streaming at the same time as the new Silverlight client is an excellent example of that. Microsoft are clearly determined to position themselves as the premier provider of tools, software and services for the web.

Silverlight is excellent technology and those asking why developers and application providers won’t just stick to flash only need to look at XAML, the runtime speed and size and the flexible options with programming languages combined with very strong multimedia support to start to see the answer. Microsoft have a battle on their hands to convince the developer and designer communities that their platform is the best platform, but most of this convincing won’t be a technical showdown but rather the establishment of trust between users and Microsoft as the vendor of this new platform. That being said, Microsoft do have the largest developer community and the excitement from that community at the conference here today was very evident – so the question won’t be if there will be a killer Silverlight app but rather when, as Microsoft have given not just traditional Microsoft .NET developers but also many others a new playground in which to build very cool new apps.

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched – but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).

To find out more about Silverlight, and to download toolkits and samples and particpiate in discussions check out the new Silverlight website at www.silverlight.net. Silverlight 1.0 will go gold sometime this summer.

Nik Cubrilovic has been a contributor to Techcrunch since early 2006. He writes a blog at www.nik.com.au and he is the CEO of Omnidrive

Google’s personalized home page, Google IG, has been rebranded as iGoogle and will relaunch tomorrow at igoogle.com. A number of bloggers were brought in to Google HQ today and are reporting the details.

iGoogle is Google’s entrant into the crowded customizable Ajax home page space, where My Yahoo is the clear leader with over 50 million monthly unique visitors. iGoogle currently has just over 7 million monthly unique visitors.

But Google has never promoted iGoogle, and it has a number of superior features to MyYahoo. The most important is that Google’s personalized home page supports widgets (they call them gadgets). Yahoo has stubbornly refused to integrate the My Yahoo property with their Konfabulator widgets platform. Through Google widgets, users can bring Gmail, Gtalk and other services right to their home page. Finally, Google allows users to customize the template of iGoogle – they say that 30% of users choose to do this.

Google is now offering a “personalized home” link on their main home page, which will drive significant numbers of new users to the site. Look out, Yahoo.

As you can see with the embedded Flash widget above, eBay is now letting users embed information about any listing or group of listings directly into a website. Their hope is to encourage bloggers and social network users who discuss famous listings to embed the information right into the page. The service will be available at togo.ebay.com this morning.

There are three types of widgets. Example of all three can be seen on this test blog set up by eBay. The first, embedded above, shows information on a single listing. users can mouse over the seller to get additional information, or do a search with the results returned within the widget itself. Users can also clone the widget for their own site. There is no requirement that the person creating the widget be the seller of the item.

The second type of widget shows up to ten separate items. The pictures rotate in a slide show, and when a viewer clicks on one, it replaces the slideshow with information about that item in the same format as the first widget. The third type of widget shows picture results based on a search query. Like the second widget, clicking on any picture shows information about that listing.

These widgets are just for fun and to generate discussion around interesting auctions, not for revenue generation by publishers. Ebay provides affiliate tools at affiliates.ebay.com and the company says that they will evolve those tools separately over time to meet the requests of affiliates. See our recent post on AuctionAds (one of our current sponsors) for eBay listing widgets that pay out affiliate fees.

Robert Scoble interviewed the team and got a demo:

SplashCast, an embeddable Flash media player, is improving its product today. They are now allowing publishers to turn any RSS feed with a media enclosure, such as a podcast or videocast, into a channel on their player. Previously SplashCast only allowed RSS feeds from YouTube and Flickr. Now, any feed can be added.

The best way to understand SplashCast is just to look at the player, which we’ve embedded below. Feeds are organized into channels, making it possible to show your favorite videos, podcasts, and photos from within one player updated through RSS. SplashCast will continuously update the shows on the channel as new content is added.

Text based RSS feeds have had several multi-channel embeddable widget based platforms, including Grazr and SpringWidgets. Multi-channel video and audio RSS feeds are a smaller category, mostly consisting of widgets that play only your own content. Along with SplashCast, Cozmo.tv has been helping develop multi-channel video players updated via RSS, but only for social video sites YouTube and Blip.tv. VodPod has also released a new widget that plays RSS feeds of videos from social video sites.

Yahoo announced today that it will acquire the 80% of advertising network RightMedia that it doesn’t already own for $680 million in cash and Yahoo stock.

Yahoo previously bought 20% of the company in a $45 million Series B round of funding announced in October 2006. The company has raised over $50 million to date.

This move counters Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick earlier this month for $3.1 billion, and signals that Yahoo wants more weapons in its arsenal to fight the ongoing online advertising war beyond their new Panama release.

RightMedia runs an advertising marketplace that allows for much more efficient advertsing pricing than older negotiated models (something still in the planning stages at DoubleClick). See our coverage of their RMX Direct product from August 2005.

RightMedia also tends to work with large intermediate ad brokers and addresses the short tail of the ad market (as does DoubleClick), whereas Overture and Adsense are definitely long tail products with many smaller advertisers and publishers.

The timing couldn’t be much better for InterActiveCorp to launch Zwinktopia, a new virtual world for young teens. Other virtual worlds, such as Gaia, Habbo Hotel, Cyworld, Neopets, Club Penguin, Webkinz and others, are exploding in terms of unique monthly visitors and total time spent at the sites.

Until today, IAC’s Zwinky was a site to make customized avatars, choosing from 10,000 different outfits, accesories and other items, and embed them onto other websites such as MySpace. Users could also become friends with other users and enage in basic social networking activities. See Stardoll as well in this space.

Most of the functionality at Zwinky is accessed via a non-mandatory browser toolbar that users install. Zwinky says that they have 20 million active toolbars that were used in March 2007. Part of Zwinky’s business model is to collect search advertising revenues from toolbar usage.

Today Zwinky will add a virtual world to the site called Zwinktopia – users can use their avatars to roam around the world, chat with other users and engage in activities to earn Zbucks, the virtual currency of Zwinktopia. Zbucks can be used to buy virtual clothing and other goods.

Zwinky is part of the Fun Webs group at IAC, which includes Smiley Central, Cursor Mania and other sites and generates over $100 million in annual revenues. The Fun Webs group is part of the Consumer Applications and Portals group (iWon and Excite are within this group) and is led by Scott Garell.

Zwinky alone has 4.7 million worldwide unique visitors in March (Comscore), far more than Second Life and the other competitors listed in the first paragraph above. If a reasonable number of them can be converted into exploring Zwinktopia, it will become the largest immersive world outside of the gaming sites like World of Warcraft. See Comscore comparision data below (U.S. only).

See GigaOm’s recent article on Gaia, which is probably closest to Zwinktopia in functionality.

Update: The company will be running the television ad promoting Zwinktopia embedded below on NBC on Monday.

update: The video of this is now available.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke at a education.au conference in Sydney, Australia last week. After his talk he took questions.

As reported by the Brisbane Times, Andrew Hansen raised his hand as a member of the press and was selected to ask a question. What Wales didn’t know is that Hansen is part of the cast of a wildly popular public television show in Australia called The Chaser’s War on Everything, a weekly half hour satire/prank show.

Hansen said “Ah, Jimmy, um, look I just have 10 questions,” and then fired off ten questions in a row, not waiting for answers (It’s normal at events like this for reporters to ask a follow up question at the same time as the initial question to save time). This is a regular prank by the cast of the show, called “Mr. Ten Questions.”

His questions:

• First, how are you enjoying Australia?

• Second, how do our computers compare to the ones in America?

• Third, why does everyone in IT look so nerdy, yet you look like a daytime soap star?

• Fourth, Mac or PC – do you really give a shit?

• Fifth, there are 1.7 million articles on Wikipedia; how long did it take you to write them all?
• Sixth, Craig Reucassel’s a bit unhappy with the photo on his page. Could you upload a better one maybe for him?
• Seventh, my dog is getting some scabs under his chin. I don’t know if you can bring him in the number of a local vet?

• Eighth, Jessica Rowe and Peter Overton – will it last?

• Ninth, cracked pepper?
• Tenth, how do you feel about the fact that when I looked you up on Wikipedia this morning I changed your page to say that you were a teenage drug lord from Malaysia?

To his credit Wales attempted to respond to four of the questions.

There’s a new Australia-based social network called FatSecret – it’s designed to help overweight people leverage a network of friends and online resources to lose weight. Like Traineo, which we wrote about last year, Fatsecret focuses on building a support network around you to monitor your progress.

Users first state their current and goal weights, and are urged to report in daily with their updated weight. This data builds a graph that is included on their profile page showing progress over time. Each user is also provided with a blog/journal and can add other Fatsecret users as friends.

Users are given information on various diets (Atkins, South Beach, etc.). Diets are commented and ranked by other users, creating a top list. There is also a recipe area with a detailed breakdown of the nutritional value of the recipe, along with user ratings and compliance with various diets. Users can upload their own recipes in a very structured way, and Fatsecret will calculate the nutritional value by analyzing the amount and types of ingredients.

Fatsecret doesn’t currently have any way to encourage or track exercise, and this is a natural place for expansion.

Overall the service is a great resource for people trying to lose weight. I believe Traineo’s method of getting four friends involved who will monitor your progress via email is a a really good idea. With Fatsecret, unless you make friends on the site or get your existing friends to also join and become members, it could quickly become a very lonely place. I would also like to see Fatsecret provide the weight graph as a widget, so users can add it to their website (see Skinnyr).

CenterNetworks has a good overview of some of the other new weight loss focused websites.

There was a lot of controversy recently when Wikipedia announced that all outbound links from the online encyclopedia would include the nofollow tag. The nofollow tag on a link is said to prevent link spamming since some search engines (Google among them) do not count links containing the tag towards any weighing of the destination page. What this means is that a link from Wikipedia will no longer boost the position of a page in search results, the intention being that this will deter spammers from sneaking links onto Wikipedia.

In Febuary of 2005 the Wikipedia community voted in favor (by a vote of 61% to 39%) of removing the nofollow tags, but this outcome was overruled by Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, earlier this year. It seems that while the nofollow tag is added to the standard outbound links, it isn’t applied to inter-wiki links, including links to Wikia, Wikipedia’s for-profit spin off. For example, on the Wikipedia page for Wikia there are a number of links to Wikia pages which do not contain the nofollow tag:

<a href="/wiki/Wookieepedia" title="Wookieepedia">Wookieepedia</a> <small>(<a href="http://www.wikia.com/wiki/c:Starwars:Main_Page" class="extiw" title="wikiasite:Starwars:Main_Page">home</a>)</small>

The result: wikis included on the white list are granted outbound links that do not contain the “nofollow” tag. These sites benefit directly by receiving higher search engine placements, which is equivalent to additional traffic and authority. Many direct competitors to Wikia, such as Wetpaint, are not included in the white list as of today.

The links to Wikia that don’t have the nofollow tag are created using a special Wikipedia tag wikiasite:. The tag for linking to Wikia pages isn’t mentioned in the help pages for Wikipedia, but there are many references to it throughout Wikipedia and the talk pages on various topics. It is a special type of link known as an Interwiki link, which means that you can use special shortcut tags when linking to other Wiki’s (such as Wikia). The question is, why wouldn’t the nofollow policy apply to inter-wiki links? Specifically since there is an apparent conflict of interest with Wikia, something that you would think that the Wikia team would want to avoid.

The Wikipedia decision to include nofollow tags was not popular and many have pointed out that nofollow is not as effective in preventing link spam as was expected. Wikipedia now has very few outbound links that are honored by search engines, and all of these links are either to other Wikipedia properties, or other wikis via the inter-wiki special links. Why the nofollow policy isn’t applied to links to external wikis we don’t know yet.

To provide an even playing field, Wikipedia should include the nofollow tag for links to all other wikis using the Wikimedia platform.

We’ve emailed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikia CEO Gil Penchina for comment but have not heard back yet.

Update: We have heard back from Jimmy Wales and he has stated that he was opposed to the nofollow policy and had only dropped his opposition to nofollow on advice from Google and others. We stated that Jimmy over-ruled earlier decisions based on the discussion that took place in this thread – in response, Jimmy Wales claims that he did not over-rule the previous decision. The nofollow tag is an important part of the anti-spam strategy at Wikipedia.

Last.fm does for music what Dutch startup Wakoopa wants to do for your desktop applications. Like Last.fm, Wakoopa uses a downloaded tracker, except it follows how often you use applications instead of listen to music. Similarly, Wakoopa has also built a Rails-powered social website around the data, letting users share their preferences with friends, write reviews of their favorite application, and download new ones. Wakoopa is backed by a fund of the three biggest media companies in the Netherlands (Ilse, IDG, Telegraaf) and launches May 2nd.

Wakoopa’s tracker logs what applications you use and for how long, updating your personal profile every 15 minutes. On the website, the aggregate data lists the most recently used applications and most used applications of all time. Each application has a profile that lists the people and groups who use it, reviews, and tags. For free applications, it also includes a download link for various versions, potentially creating a more social SourceForge. For the private beta, Firefox is the top used application, used by 23 people logging over 117 hours. MSN messenger is an odd second place, logging a total of 14 hours.

Since raving about desktop applications doesn’t have the same mass market appeal of music, I can’t see it breaking out of the developer community unless the tracker is bundled with some really attractive freebies.

We’d like to take a moment and thank our sponsors and readers that help us keep TechCrunch humming…

Voxbone – A VoIP carrier providing centralized access to local phone numbers and toll-free numbers around the world. They have their own network entirely devoted to voice traffic powered by Cisco routers and switches. With their network, you can allocate blocks of phone numbers to your customers, connect calls between VoIP and PSTN phone lines, share phone traffic capacity, and create your own solutions with their API. All for one fixed monthly fee.

Plazes – It’s what I would call geographic social networking. Plazes helps you friends see where you are and what you’re up to while on your computer or mobile phone. You can use it to keep in touch with friends and family or find new friends who are Plazes users that share the same location or interests. Plazes also connects you to the places you go to, letting you save pictures and media to the places you go.

Conduit – Personalized tool bars. Conduit lets publishers (or anyone, really) create specialized tool bars that provide all tools you and your community need. TechCrunch has it’s own tool bar (download here) that lets you search, keep you up to date on the feeds for the entire CrunchNetwork, and even listen to the latest TalkCrunch podcasts. If that’s not good enough for you, then build your own.

Pageflakes – Customized personal pages. Pageflakes lets you create your own personalized portal to the web. You can easily customize you page by selecting your interests or fine tune it by selecting from their wide array of widgets based off of their API. Recently, I’ve been using their backgammon flake. It’s simple to share the page with friends by making it public. No sign-in required.

Edgeio – Classified listings and content had always come together in print because advertisers wanted their message to reach the publisher’s readers. Edgeio is letting advertisers get that same exposure on the web, syndicating listings through publishers that cater to the advertiser’s audience. TechCrunch’s own CrunchBoard is powered by Edgeio’s latest product, Edgeio Marketplaces, which lets publishers monetize their sites through listings advertised on their own site and Edgeio’s whole network.

Auction Ads – eBay is great, but Auction Ads helps you reach potential buyers in their day-to-day web surfing. Auction Ads lets you publicize your auctions or make money as a publisher in three simple steps.

Upcoming Conferences and Discounts:

May 1: The Stanford Accel Symposium at Stanford is offering TechCrunch readers a 15% discount off $395 tickets to The Future of Advertising in Digital Media. Register with discount code: “TechCrunch.”

June 7-8: The Future of Online Advertising Conference in New York has offered to give away 5 free tickets to TechCrunch readers. Email us to enter the drawing to win a ticket (valued at $995 each.) Emails must be received by midnight PST Friday May 4.

June 20-21: Supernova has extended a $200 registration discount to TechCrunch readers through May 11. Register using “crunch2e” for the two-day main conference or “crunch3e” for the full conference.

Red Swoosh (acquired by Akamai for $15 million earlier this month) released v1.0 of FoxTorrent today. This is a fully functional BitTorrent client for Firefox that works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and has a very cool additional feature – the ability to stream files as they are downloading.

This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete.

A good early review is here.

A new service called ScratchYourself came to our attention today. It’s a fairly simple Flash application that lets users upload an image and build a lottery-style scratch card from it. During the beta period people have a chance to win some very limited cash prizes that total $90 or so per day across all winners.

Once a scratch card has been created, users can email it to friends or embed it on their site. I created a quick scratch card with our logo and have embedded it below.

What interests me more than the front end, which would easily be duplicated, is the business model and payments infrastructure they’ve put in place. Users have an incentive to create and embed these on their blogs, MySpace page, etc.: if you create a scratchcard and someone wins a prize, you get the same prize as the creator of the card. Prizes are awarded, at the winner’s choice, via paypal, mailed check or amazon gift certificate.

The company’s business model is to attract advertisers to sponsor prizes (cash, products, coupons). If ScratchYourself turns out to be trustworthy and can circumnavigate the rather complicated federal and state regulations governing sweepstakes, brands could be attracted to this. You get a good long look at the image underneath the scratch area, which is more than can be said for most banner advertising. And publishers will like the ability to win the same prizes as their readers.

Shycast and Bix (acquired by Yahoo) are also experimenting with brand based contests, albeit through video (and Shycast is also a social network).

Note: If you make a goatse scratchcard, please do not share it with me (yes, I thought about all kinds of things that you people will want to try out).

I’ve become a bit of a twitterholic over the last month or so, and update my twitter page frequently with updates that don’t belong here or on Crunchnotes. I’ve suffered through a slow and sometimes down site without complaint – they’re growing like a weed and need some time to stabilize.

But then my account was deleted. My last post before the deletion was directed at Twitter co-founder Evan Williams – “@ev never, never, never say that. never.” I was responding to a jab he was taking at Apple products.

I noticed that I couldn’t log in and assumed the service was simply down. But it went on for days and no one else was complaining. So I emailed to ask what the issue was, and they were able to restore the account. no data seems to be lost.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says they haven’t received any other messages about deleted accounts. He alse says

It appears that during a routine backup, your index was somehow misplaced or not copied correctly which is why it resulted in a “404 – Not Found” error. Once you emailed me, we found your updates in the database right where they should be and corrected the error.

There were zero reports of 404 pages like this aside from yours so while we’re not 100% certain it looks to have been just the sort of error 404 pages were born to handle. Upgrades and/or maintenance we were doing on the same day was thought to be unrelated when I asked the rest of the team about this.

So there’s no conspiracy, it’s just the growing pains of a very popular service.

I’m not saying a word about scalability and Ruby On Rails, either. But as one of (or the) largest Ruby on Rails applications on the web, a lot of people are keeping an eye on how it scales.

Apple’s Steve Jobs, perhaps the most important person in the music industry today, says again that Apple is not planning on selling music via a subscription model like many of his competitors.

The strategy certainly makes sense as long as as Jobs continues to win territory in his war against DRM, and the subscription music services fail to lure a critical mass of consumers.

More than 2.5 billion songs have now been purchased from iTunes and they control 85% or so of the download music market. DRM free songs on iTunes cost 30 cents more, almost certainly creating greater margin for Apple per song.

The subscription music services are highly competitive, leaving little profit for the providers. As long as Apple can keep selling tracks for a dollar or more per track, they’ll resist entering this market.

AOL has started beta testing a new home page (the main AOL.com portal). AOL Senior Product Manager (and occasional TechCrunch contributor) Frank Gruber introduced it on his personal blog earlier today, although he is not the product manager for the product.

Nice portal…but it is nearly identical to Yahoo home page, which was redesigned last year. Click on the image above for a larger view. Internally, I’m hearing AOLers refer to the new portal as “the Yahoo Portal” although its official name is AOL 3.0.

Internet companies like to copy things from their competitors that work, but as we’ve seen even the largest companies sometimes get caught copying a little too much.

AOL says they are building best of breed products, not simply copying things from Google, Yahoo and others that are proven to work and porting them to its less cutting-edge audience. In the past year, though, we’ve seen them largely copy digg and then release a new mail product that would have been awesome two years ago but which stacks up poorly to the current versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

David Liu, Senior Vice President of Portals & Personal Media at AOL, has told me that a number of new products in development are going to be impressive. I’ve seen early demos and wireframes of some of them, and I think he’s right. The company needs a category killer to get some street cred.

TiVo came along and is helping kill the idea of a TV time slot. The growth of on demand online video has been helping finish the job. Cozmo.Tv wants to create a TV 2.0 by changing the way you consume online video from a random walk to personalized content. Next week at Always On, they will officially announce the new embeddable video widget they’ve been working on for the past couple of months. The widget functions like an online TV, streaming channels of personalized video content based on the initial preferences set by the widget publisher and the preferences of the viewer.

Publishers seed their widget with the initial channels by adding explicit RSS feeds to video sites or keyword searches run on Cozmo’s video index. Basing channels off of feeds means that a widget can be set up and forgotten, adding content to its channels as new shows appear in the feed. At launch the indexed sites will include videos from YouTube and Blip.tv, but will expand to include Google Video, MySpace, Brightcove, and Break.com. Eventually publishers will also be able to seed their widget with relevant channels by having Cozmo analyze their personal blog or profile page (where most widgets will be installed). The one below is pulling CBS’s YouTube clips along with some others, including a channel of videos you’d find by searching YouTube for kittens.

On the viewers end, you can surf over channels or shows and rate them. When you’re signed in, Cozmo tracks how you rate shows and then will suggest the shows on that channel rated highly by other viewers similar to you in voting history and demographic.

Cozmo wants to eventually move beyond viral video sites after scaling up the service. They are logging 25,000 uniques to their site each month, but want the upcoming widget to be their main form of distribution. The widget is designed to be a self contained version of Cozmo’s entire offering, allowing users to sign up for accounts, rip the code for the current player, or create their own.

The hope is that after building up a network of these widget players, they’ll serve as a direct distribution parter for content creators. Creators and affiliates who distribute the content will get revenue shares of contextual banner and interstitial video ads served on the player.

Readers interested in customized online video channels should check out SplashCast’s RSS-based multimedia player, MeeVee’s personalized online video guide, Blinkx’s Blinkx It widget, and of course Joost.

Adobe have announced tonight, via Robert Scoble and the ScobleShow that they are opening up the Flex platform under a Mozilla Public License (an Open Source license). Flex is a group of technologies (much similar to .NET or J2EE etc.) that provides a more programmer-friendly development environment for Flash, rather than a graphics-driven environment that Flash was associated with.

Previously the source code to the ActionScript components in the Flash SDK were available, and from tonights release Adobe will also open source other components of the SDK such as the compiler, debugger (written in Java) and the class libraries. When compared to other development platforms, Flash/Flex has always been more closed and controlled than other alternatives, while a few open source projects have attempted to reverse engineer parts of it (although the server components aren’t being opened up). The schedule is that the development community and all code will be available by the end of the year, and while having code is great, the better part is that Adobe will be putting all their weight behind the open source projects with developers, support etc. (something you might expect them to do).

This announcement can be taken out of context, and it is important to understand that Adobe are opening up tools that help developers build applications – the runtime will remain closed (Flash itself). I actually can’t imagine a platform being able to survive *without* all the developer tools and class libraries being completely open, and perhaps this is what has spurred Adobe to open up Flex. If you look at other popular development platforms such as even Win32, the analogous tools to Flex have usually always been open or at least accessible, as it greatly assists developers.

Adobe are opening up part of their ecosystem, which is great, but don’t hold your breath for an open source Flash runtime anytime soon (unlike Java). If you are a Flex developer, this is great news for you, as you will now be able to dig a bit deeper and contribute to the tools such as the compiler and debugger – but this announcement will definitely be met with calls of ‘not enough’ from the open source community and those waiting for a fully open and cross platform rich application platform from Adobe.

Mozy is in the news again after announcing a huge enterprise deal with General Electric last week. Today they’ve pushed a Mac version of their desktop backup solution for consumers. I’ve been using it for a week, and it’s extremely good.

Previously Mozy and competitor Carbonite were excellent ways of backing up Windows based hard drives. Both are very reasonably priced at about $60/year – Mozy allows 2 GB to be stored for free and charges $5/month for unlimited storage, while Carbonite has a 15 day free trial and then charges $5 per month with discounts for pre-payment. Neither charge for bandwidth.

With both solutions you download and install the software and the service then slowly begins to backup your hard drive based on your settings.

Carbonite still only supports XP (and is a great choice for Windows users). Mozy is the only choice for Mac users and I highly recommend it after my testing. You can make a simple request to back up up the entire hard drive, or get more granular and just back up, say, iTunes and iPhoto.

In January StockPickr announced an investment stake and partnership deal with TheStreet.com. It looks like both sides liked the deal; this evening TheStreet.com announced that they acquired the company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Stockpickr is one of a few new startups in the financial markets space that we’ve been tracking. See our coverage of SeekingAlpha, Zecco, Motley Fool as well.