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New Media News Every Morning

Lycos Cinema relaunches, offers VOD

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Lycos, Inc. has relaunched its cinema service, adding video on demand rentals to its existing ad-supported community. With the new Lycos Cinema, users now have the option of watching and interacting around premium rentals and free VOD ad-supported film and episodic television titles. Lycos’s patent-pending synchronous Watch and Interact technology now enables multiple users to view the same video at the same time with anyone, anywhere, and anytime.

The new Lycos Cinema player utilizes the latest in Flash Media Serving Technology, employing MPEG-4 to deliver H.264 streams, to provide higher video quality and offering better security for content partners.

I almost forgot about Lycos until today when I got the word about this relaunched service. It’s a good service to offer, but a very tight venture to maneuver.

Originally posted on May 5, 2008 @ 2:01 pm

blinkx doubles ad sales team to take advantage of online opportunities

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The economy is undoubtedly down but it does not mean that everything has to ground to a halt. This is actually the best time to plan for the future and with massive online TV opportunity, blinkx is well into its game as it double its advertising sales team to support new business development. New hires will join blinkx in San Francisco, London, Los Angeles and New York.

The online TV and video advertising market is growing exponentially and is expected to reach $7.2 billion in the US by 2012.

Originally posted on May 7, 2008 @ 11:23 am

Weather Underground launches interactive weather map on the Internet

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Weather Underground announced the availability of its new interactive weather map. WunderMap is an interactive visual display of weather information that is plotted and overlaid on a map interface. Users can choose from a variety of weather layers, including animated radar, current conditions, severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, live webcam images and animated infrared or visible satellite imagery showing cloud coverage.

Users will find the new feature useful in that it provides a meaningful and uniform representation of multiple types of weather data in an easy to use, interactive format. The level of user-interactivity that can be achieved with the WunderMap makes it a powerful tool for avid meteorologists, while still maintaining a clean and intuitive design for the casual weather observer.

Originally posted on April 30, 2008 @ 12:26 pm

Filed Under: Web

Score One for the Bad Guys

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Squiggly letters and jagged numbers might have already overstayed their welcome on the Web.  These annoying yet necessary human verification tests, which attempt to keep our personal information safe and blogs free of junk, have been defeated.

According to Websense, the security firm that has identified the hacking, warns that a computer was able to beat the system and proceed to create multiple Hotmail accounts in order to disseminate spam.

Similar attacks have recently occurred against Microsoft’s Live Mail accounts and Google’s Gmail and Blogger services.

Ferris Research, an analyst firm specializing in messaging and collaboration, estimates that spam (and preventative measures) cost the U.S. economy $42 billion annually.

Computers are looking more and more human everyday.  Beware.

Read more at the Houston Chronicle.

Originally posted on May 3, 2008 @ 3:37 pm