billso.com

Universal Music Group has announced its deal with Qtrax for free music downloads. See these reports from the Associated Press and Engadget. UMG is the first of the major recording labels to reach such an accord.

Back on 27 January 2008, I published a billso.com story about the Qtrax free music download service. Qtrax intends to earn advertising revenue from its P2P web site and software.

Of course, Qtrax hasn’t released any Mac software yet. There’s a beta version available for Windows users. The Qtrax browser is based on Mozilla, and it sounds vaguely like Flock.

Sometimes it takes a few months to work out all the pesky details.

I recently implemented OpenID on billso.com. OpenID is a single sign-on (SSO) system that lets web users log on to multiple sites with the same username and password. SSO support is becoming a key success factor for social networking and social media web sites, as new users struggle to manage a growing number of passwords.

With OpenID, no one needs to apply for a user account on billso.com. They can use their username and credentials from another site to join billso.com, or to post a comment on a billso.com article.

Kyle Neath posted a long rant about OpenID yesterday. He won’t be implementing OpenID on his site because he thinks the system too confusing for users. I don’t think OpenID is that difficult to understand - here are two brief explanations from OpenID.net and Wikipedia.

Phishing phears

Kyle’s concerned that phishers might target OpenID users, and he uses PayPal as an example. That site has become a primary target for phishing attacks.

OpenID does have an identity system that lets an authorized user revoke their OpenID as a last resort. Anyone who uses an OpenID should select a strong passphrase, as I described in this billso.com article from 24 Aprill 2008. OpenID can also add multifactor authentication to their service. Checking a user’s location, or asking for a token or passphrase that only the user should have, in addition to the regular passphrase, would provide a strong defense against phishers. Virtual keyboards and other systems could also be used, as I described in this billso.com article from 17 April 2008.

The provider’s burden

I understand some of Kyle’s points. Any web site that implements OpenID for SSO could also become a provider of OpenIDs. I decided not to do this right from the start. I don’t want to provide perpetual support users who request a billso.com OpenID username. There is a system that lets departing OpenID providers delegate their users to another provider.

On 30 April 2008, I posted some programming code that lets a popular WordPress OpenID plugin use JanRain’s ID Selector tool. There are several providers of OpenIDs that can carry the long-term burden of maintaining these accounts, including VeriSign, AOL, Google, Flickr, and WordPress.com.

Universities could become OpenID providers. It makes sense to give students and employees access to a global SSO system, as long as schools are willing to provide stable, permanent usernames for their stakeholders.

Users can also purchase a personal identity domain for around US$10 a year and get a personalized OpenID URL.

Related posts from billso.com

• 30 April 2008: Updating WP-OpenID to support ID Selector
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 17 April 2008: Virtual keyboards and monitoring software foil keystroke loggers
• 12 April 2008: Finding business contacts and passwords on the Internet
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 2 July 2007: CXOs face malware email attacks
• 11 January 2007: How to create a secure password

It’s pretty easy to get a legal copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for Windows, but you have to act before 16 May 2008.

Go to this web site, enter your .edu email address, and be prepared to send a copy or scan of your university student ID card. This Microsoft site has more details.

The offer started in September 2007, and the suite includes:

• Access 2007
• Accounting Express 2007
• Excel 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• Groove 2007
• OneNote 2007
• Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• PowerPoint 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Word 2007

From the Associated Press via Sports Illustrated and Forbes: National Football League commissioner Roger Goddell has announced that the league will enact and enforce tougher regulations regarding technology and spying for the 2008 season. The NFL has allowed radios for offensive play-calling since 1994, but mobile computer and video technology have advanced far faster than the league’s regulations ever anticipated.

The three-time NFL champion New England Patriots have been the subject of intense scrutiny after a staff member was caught videotaping defensive coaching signals during the team’s 2007 season opener. The NFL and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) are each investigating multiple allegations that the Patriots had been videotaping opposing teams since coach Bill Belichick was hired in 2000.

Former Patriots employee Matt Walsh recently sent 8 video tapes of Patriots opponents to the NFL office for analysis. According to Mike Fish of ESPN, at least one tape included offensive coaches from another team. Previously, it was believed that the Patriots only taped defensive coaches.

What about the FCC?

Most of the discussions I have read about the so-called Spygate scandal have missed an important legal point. The NFL depends upon large multi-billion dollar contracts from US television networks for a significant portion of the league’s revenue and market power. Every regular-season and post-season game is televised. The NFL also owns and operates its own television network, which carries 8 regular season games, many pre-season games, and a 24/7 stream of interviews, documentaries, replays and other NFL content. See this article from CBS Sports for more details.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has specific regulations on how sports may be broadcast in the United States. One key rule is that live televised sporting events must be “free of artifice”. In other words, games cannot be rigged or fixed in any way.

This is one reason that professional wrestling broadcasts use a great deal of taped and edited content. Pro wrestling is marketed as , not a sporting event.

“When we met with [the] commissioner, the discussion was how we proceed in an era when technology is expanding exponentially,” Indianapolis Colts president Bill Polian said. “The question is how do we keep on top of that. This is far less about what happened in the past and how we deal with it in the future.”

I’ve been grading the last batch of papers and final exams for my online students this week. Some of my blog posts are shorter than usual, but I have been posting some long articles that I had finished a few weeks ago.

I’ll return to my usual long posts next week.

Grading has been a challenge because one part of the TurnitIn.com grading system is not working properly. One reason that I like TurnItIn.com is its online paper marking system, GradeMark. The commenting portion of the system is working just fine.

Usually I check off my scoring marks in a very pretty graphical matrix, which then calculates the assignment grade based upon the total number of possible points for the criterion (row) multiplied by a percentage on a vertical scale (column).

I have to create that matrix in a web-based editor, and it’s the matrix editor that is crashing. The matrix files are stored as a complex text file, and I have not figured out a way to create that file myself. Here’s an example of a rubric file.

So I have reverted to my old stand-by system: typing the scoring matrix into the general comments section of each paper’s GradeMark report.

Then I calculate the grade myself and enter that number into the TurnItIn.com gradebook.

This takes a bit longer than the automated system, but I rigged up a macro that types in a basic grading matrix for me.

Google is teaming up with Clearwire, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Intel to build a national WiMAX network. See the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Branding Post for more details.

The new joint venture will retain the Clearwire brand name and Clearwire’s existing consumer WiMAX business. Sprint contributes its network infrastructure and 2.5 gHz frequency allocation. It’s possible this deal will clear the FCC and antitrust regulators, because Google isn’t a major owner in the JV.

Yesterday, a Wall Street journal blog referenced my billso.com article of 18 April 2008 in a discussion about Yahoo and Google’s possible cross-licensing deal. The Clearwire deal is a more direct combination that may help the JV partners lock in consumers, businesses and advertisers.

Too many partners?

I’m reluctant to believe if this large joint venture can actually work. Sprint is the lead partner with a 51 percent stake, and this seems like a desperation move to being acquired outright by Deutsche Telekom or another company.

Pricing and marketing may determine if consumers will pay any attention to this JV. Can Clearwire and Sprint can offer their existing customers some compelling reasons to get some new hardware and try WiMAX? Verizon earns 23 percent of its wireless revenue from data calls on that company’s EVDO and other networks.

Google does need a vast network in the US to support its Android smartphone platform, and the company can’t wait or afford to build it from scratch.

WiMAX would give Google an alternate medium for data service, instead of relying on one telecom carrier as Apple has done with AT&T. Even with 3G service, the iPhone’s data transfer rates will seem slow when the user can’t get WiFi access.

Yes, the iPhone does support WiFi. But I’m sure Clearwire and its partners will market Android phones that support WiFi as well as WiMAX and the sponsoring carrier’s cell phone service, but the battery drain for a typical mobile device user may be a serious problem.

Photo by fer-martin is provided through a Creative Commons license

Related posts on billso.com

• 6 May 2008: T-Mobile’s parent may buy Sprint
• 29 April 2008: New iPhone will be subsidized, faster and thinner
• 22 April 2008: Android vs iPhone
• 18 April 2008: Antitrust regulators would fight a Yahoo-Google combination
• 18 March 2008: The 700 mHz auction is over
• 28 February 2008: The Google cable
• 22 February 2008: Customer lock-in
• 20 January 2008: Nokia, Sprint announce layoffs
• 9 December 2007: The mobile office in Honolulu
• 12 September 2007: The Google Phone and the iPhone – both looking for software and spectrum
• 27 August 2007: Wireless providers gird themselves for battle
• 14 June 2007: Clearwire signs WiMax deal with DirecTV, EchoStar
• 5 February 2007: Wireless from the inside out

IDG, the publisher of InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, MacWorld and other technology magazines has been shifting away from paper to online editions. This New York Times article mentions that the transition has generated more revenue than the company expected:

Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

This is remarkable given that some IDG titles like CIO magazine are distributed free of free of charge. Advertisers subsidize the content for both the web-based and print editions. While some IDG titles like InfoWorld are online only, CIO is still available in a twice-monthly print edition, largely because advertisers believe the target audience is less likely to read the online version. CIO also features longer articles than InfoWorld these days.

IDG has also added multiple RSS feeds to its web sites, to capture readers who prefer to use feed aggregators.

Many of these IDG magazines have been cited in previous billso.com articles, such as this post from 7 May 2008. I also list some of these titles on my references page, which contains many reliable and authoritative sources for researchers, managers and my students.