However, it looks like those issues may finally be resolved with Google paying the same attachment fees that cable and telecommunications companies pay utilities to use their poles, as opposed to paying additional costs associated with stringing cable higher up on the pole where electricity cables hang. A Google spokeswoman confirmed that the fiber was getting strung, but couldn’t tell me what percentage of the network would be underground as opposed to aerial. She said via email, “We don’t have a percentage estimate but we’re starting on utility poles and down the line, the fiber-to-the-home connections will be terrestrial.” Fiber is far cheaper to deploy aerially than planted in the ground because it avoids the labor costs associated with digging trenches.

Google has said it would start signing up customers by the end of 2011 and that it would begin connecting customers in “early 2012.” If the company has just begun laying its fiber, that may push things back a bit. The project has experienced a few minor delays, but so far seems to be moving ahead. Rather than when, I’m actually far more curious about what Google’s network architecture will be and what it will cost.

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Nest sent me its official response this morning which is: “We have not yet reviewed the actual filing, which we learned about this morning through Honeywell’s press release. We will provide comment once we’ve had the opportunity to review it.”

So what technology is Honeywell talking about specifically? Oh, only the some key features of the Nest device including the outer controlling ring dial, the interview questions to start programming the thermostat, tech around being able to control the thermostat via the Internet, the Nest “Time to Temperature” function, and the way that the Nest thermostat diverts small amounts of power from the house’s electrical load to power itself. Here’s the details:

Natural Language Installer Setup for Controller (504): This is essentially the set of questions that programmable thermostats can ask the owner, like “What temperature do you like when the heat is on?” and “What time do you get up in the morning?” and “What time do you go to sleep at night.” Honeywell says it already offers this type of question set for its Prestige 2.0 smart thermostat line and it owns a patent for this.

Controller Interface with Dynamic Schedule Display (948): This pertains to interface features that make it easier to operate a thermostat and reduce energy like Nest’s “time to temperature” function. The time to temperature function displays how long it will take for the room to heat up or cool down to the desired temperature, so that the user isn’t tempted to set the thermostat too high or low to speed up the time to comfort.

Profile Based Method for Deriving a Temperature Setpoint Using a Delta Based on Cross Indexing a Received Price Point Level Signal (958): This patent includes methods for reducing energy costs by controlling a thermostat with information stored in a remote location. This is essentially about controlling a thermostat remotely through the Internet. This seems like a broad one, so I’ll leave it to the legal buffs to make a call on it.

HVAC Controller (899): Honeywell says it has a patent for technology around the rotatable ring that is used to control the Nest thermostat. That’s Nests highlighted main design point: it’s Nest ring.

Thermostat with mechanical user interface (789) and Thermostat with Offset Drive (790): These ones discuss placing a non-rotating part near or inside a rotating part, while still enabling the rotating part to control the function. Essentially this is another patent that says the Nest Ring violates Honeywell’s IP.

Power Stealing Control Devices (988): This patent covers the way that the Nest thermostat powers itself by “diverting or skimming” small amounts of charge from the heating and cooling power load. This includes a switch and a circuit to divert power from the home’s electrical system to the thermostat.

And finally, while this isn’t a Honeywell patent, Honeywell includes an image of a Kohler temperature controller for the Mira Platinum Wireless Shower product, which it points out looks “strikingly similar” to the Nest design:

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The Devium Dash is a 4-inch-by-7-inch unit that is installed the same way as an in-dash GPS unit, but it replaces your whole stereo.  It’s a pretty plain design, with a slot to pop in an iPhone or an iPod touch and scroll knob. Founder Jeff Lizer says other smartphones will fit eventually too, but he started off with the original design for the iPhone because he “had to focus on a single product to get this right.”

The product’s information page says that your iPhone will fit with or without the rubber bumper that many people use. And we shouldn’t fret if Apple changes the body style for its next iPhone, he writes: ”I know the iPhone ’5′ may be released this summer and if its dimensions are similar to the current iPhones then it will work without purchasing a new faceplate. If the new iPhone varies too much, a new faceplate will be developed and released as soon as possible.”

Other interesting specs, according to the official site for Devium Dash:

Right now, Devium Dash is a Kickstarter project and is a little under halfway to its $45,000 funding goal. The company seems confident they’ll meet the goal and start producing units by July — the price will be $300 at retail. Those who cough up $250 now will get a unit when they start shipping, according to an announcement made Monday.

Speaking from experience, it’s amazing how out-of-date even a pretty nice two-year-old car’s stereo can be. It has a CD player and a digital interface, but all I really want to do is listen to my iTunes playlists anyway. My car did come with a 30-pin connector inside the middle console that lets you plug in an iPhone or iPod and control the device through the car’s dashboard. But the car’s frustrating interface uses buttons you click and a wheel you scroll, which is a pain when you’re used to touchscreen tapping or scrolling when selecting your music.

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• Brightcove had 3,872 customers in over 50 countries by the end of 2011.
• The company’s 2011 revenue was $63.6 million, compared to $43.7 million in 2010. Its net loss in 2011 $17.8 million, compared to $17.3 million in 2010. It expects to continue to have losses in 2012.
• Brightcove employed 312 people in 9 different countries by the end of 2011.
• Brightcove generated 66 percent of its revenue in the U.S. in 2011.
• Brightcove’s customers served on average 743 million streams per month in 2011. More than half of those streams were delivered outside of the U.S..
• Most of the media is delivered through Akamai and Limelight, but the contract with Limelight is currently up for renewal.
• The New York Times is not only one of Brightcove’s biggest customers, but also a minority shareholder that owns less than 5 percent of the company’s stock.
• Brightcove doesn’t mention any of its direct competitors by name, but mentions YouTube three times in the filing.
• Brightcove will trade at NASDAQ under the stock symbol BCOV.
• The offering is led by Morgan Stanley and Stifel Nicolaus Weisel, and underwritten by RBC Capital Markets, Pacific Crest Securities and Raymond James.

What does the filing mean for the online video space in general? Our own Ryan Lawler summed it up best last August:

“Brightcove deserves kudos for making it this far while other online video companies have either been acquired at fire sale prices or bit the dust. But the modest revenues revealed by its IPO filing show just how hard it is to make money in online video, even while viewers are tuning in droves.”

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“Android has been criticized for offering a more complex user experience than its competitors, but the company’s wide carrier support and large app selection is appealing to new smartphone customers,”  said Ross Rubin, executive director of Connected Intelligence for The NPD Group, in a statement. “Android’s support of LTE at Verizon has also made it the exclusive choice for customers who want to take advantage of that carrier’s fastest network.”

Price would seem to be a factor, since Android handset makers like HTC, LG  and Motorola make many lower-tier phones that far undercut the latest iPhone 4S. But viewing Android’s success solely in terms of price doesn’t paint the whole picture as evidenced by NPD’s sales numbers for the iPhone 3GS, which AT&T is giving away for free with a two-year contract. The 4S outsold the 3GS five to one, despite the latter’s steep discount. The iPhone 4S also outsold the 4 – which unlike the 3GS is available on three of the four nationwide networks – by 75 percent, according to NPD. If price was the biggest factor, customers had plenty of cheap iPhone options to choose from.

In addition, customers buying Android devices aren’t simply gravitating toward cheap phones. The Samsung S II and the Galaxy S 4G – handsets that measure up to the iPhone both on features and price — were the fourth and fifth best selling devices in the fourth quarter, behind the three commercially available iPhone models.

Still, the average selling price for a U.S. smartphone in the fourth quarter was $143, up from $135 in the third quarter, but down from $149 year-over-year. The release of the iPhone 4S last fall is responsible for the big quarter-over-quarter bump in average selling prices, but Android seems to be driving a long-term decline in overall U.S. smartphone pricing.

That could be both good news and bad news for the handset makers that feed the lower-end of the market. There’s still plenty of growth left in smartphones with less than 50 percent penetration in the U.S. HTC, Moto and LG have all been suffering in the smart device market – HTC just posted another weak quarter. While they could potentially take a big share of the remaining market by selling cheaper, lower-margin devices, they might not be able to achieve much in the way of follow-up. When it comes to buying their next more-expensive smartphones, those customers seem to be choosing Apple and Samsung.

Image courtesy of Flickr user geoliv

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Details around the deal are limited, but here is what we know.

1. Verizon will own 65 percent of the joint venture while Coinstar, Redbox’s parent company, will own 35 percent.
2. The service will offer something Netflix currently doesn’t — a download option, which makes it more competitive with Amazon’s video offerings.
3. The offering will be available nationwide, not merely to Verizon customers.
4. Using Redbox helps the joint venture get access to new releases as content companies are trying to add more “windows” to the movie release process. Windowing is what content companies use to spread out the time between a movie released in theaters, when it hits rentals stores and when it makes its way to other services such as premium TV channels. The general thinking is this increases profits for each movie, but opinion is divided on that, and consumers hate it.
5. Verizon is counting on its existing relationship as a pay TV provider to get more content to the joint venture.
6. Whatever the end product looks like, it will launch in the second half of this year.

Given these facts, as scant as they are, it’s easy to see the threat to Netflix, as people could view the two offerings as fairly interchangeable as long as the pricing is competitive and the content is relatively equal. But without knowing about pricing or the content, the deal still has the potential to be a win for Verizon, given video is huge bandwidth suck on wireline and wireless networks. Netflix traffic was estimated to take up 20 percent of U.S. broadband traffic during peak hours according to Sandvine in the fall of 2010.

For Verizon, a streaming joint venture has three benefits. One, if it makes money from the service, that’s an additional revenue stream as well as a way to capture some value from its customers who cut the cord. Two, if the service can really deliver a video product that consumers love and will use, it will help drive traffic across Verizon’s networks. Customers in the FiOS areas will have a reason to sign up for the service if they haven’t already, while the joint venture will help drive traffic to mobile devices and other areas of the country. Verizon has a business selling bandwidth on 100 gigabit per second backbone pipes as well as leasing its fiber to cell phone providers to use as mobile backhaul.

Finally the joint venture gives Verizon a seat at the table with content companies as the industry tries to find new economic models based on the reality of an IP infrastructure that can deliver any content to anyone, anywhere. Sure, content companies are fighting the future with windowing and complicated rights agreements, while ISPs are trying to protect their business with broadband caps, but the future is coming, and Verizon is trying to get in on the ground floor rather than watch it pass it by.

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I switched away from buying digital albums to Rdio’s $9.99 a month subscription several months ago and find it to be a great way to enjoy music. Before you ask why I chose Rdio over Spotify and others: Rdio offers a discounted family plan that its peers don’t. As good as Rdio may sound, however, its previous Android client reminded me of Android 1.6: Mostly functional but not pretty to look at.

The new client, however, looks stellar and adds features that bring it up to par with Rdio’s app for Apple iOS. The navigation interface is much improved, with one-click access to most functions. Support for browsing new releases, the top charts and Rdio’s recommendations — based on your listening history — are now part of the software, as are the social components. You can now see what other friends using Rdio are listening to and it’s easier to see which tunes you have stored for offline use.

While the app is improved for all supported Android platforms, I especially like the support for remote control clients, which was added to Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich. That means the album art and music controls are available on the lock screen of an Android 4.0 device; handy when I’m running with my Galaxy Nexus.

All in all, this is a must-have upgrade for Rdio users on Android. The only issue I’ve had so far is more of a nuisance than anything else. Once I upgraded to the new version, Rdio had to re-sync, or download, all of my offline music tracks again.

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The Nest thermostat (in cooling mode).

Thermostat giant Honeywell has filed a lawsuit alleging patent infringement by the buzzy Silicon Valley startup Nest Labs, which makes a smart learning thermostat. Honeywell has spent decades developing thermostat technology and just last week the company told me it had developed and tested learning thermostat technology, like the kind Nest has introduced, but that it had decided not to commercialize the learning tech after weak user response.

Honeywell says its patent infringement lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota and also targets Best Buy that sells the Nest tech, applies to thermostat intellectual property including:

• Natural Language Installer Set Up for Controller
• Controller Interface with Dynamic Schedule Display
• HVAC Controller
• Thermostat with Mechanical User Interface
• Thermostat with Offset Drive
• Power Stealing Control Devices
• Profile Based Method for Deriving a Temperature Setpoint Using a ‘Delta’ Based On Cross-Indexing a Received Price-Point Level Signal.

Beth Wozniak, president, Honeywell Environmental and Combustion Controls, said in a statement about the lawsuit that “Competition is good and we welcome it, but we will not stand by while competitors, large or small, offer products that infringe on our intellectual property.”

I met with Wozniak last week and she told me that connected thermostats are still a small part of Honeywell’s overall thermostat sales, and that it’s the very early days of the connected thermostat market. Honeywell sells a whole host of other connected home products such as humidifiers and security systems, and a “total connected home system.” Honeywell has been focused on adding intelligence to digital and connected thermostats through simple UI, mobile apps, and partnerships like its one with Opower.

Energy software startup Opower will be providing the analytics and data to help Honeywell use home and building thermostats for demand response programs, where utilities can ask home owners to turn down their heating and cooling slightly during peak times of day. The Opower thermostats are being piloted with utilities right now, including at PG&E.

Nest officially launched its learning thermostat late last year, and the product was designed and created by Tony Fadell, the former chief architect at Apple, who led the development of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone. The company is backed by funding from Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures and Al Gore’s investment fund. Nest says it has developed the world’s first learning thermostat and that its thermostat can save home owners 20 to 30 percent on their energy bills.

Here’s an unboxing of the Nest thermostat:

And an onstage interview with Tony Fadell, founder of Nest:

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FierceWireless’ Mike Dano dug up the FCC filings and wrote an excellent, detailed report you can find here. Here’s a summary of the major points:

• The proposed network, which Qualcomm is calling Next-Gen AG, would make use of 500 MHz of spectrum in the 14 GHz band. That’s a huge amount – more than all of the nationwide bandwidth  available to the entire U.S. cellular industry today – but at such high frequencies, available airwaves are plentiful. The problem is they’re useless for ground-based cellular networks since those airwaves require enormous power to propagate any reasonable distance. Your phone doesn’t have the juice to communicate with a distant tower at higher frequencies, but an airplane does.
• While the Next Gen-AG’s huge carrier bandwidths would allow theoretical speeds of 300 Gbps, you have to remember that the cellular network is shared capacity. Qualcomm proposes that only 150 towers anchored to the earth would be necessary, compared to the tens of thousands required for a terrestrial network. A single cell’s 300 gigs of capacity would be shared by hundreds of airplanes at any given moment, and airlines would then further subdivide that capacity. For instance, they could use the network to offer on-demand entertainment to each seat and sell bandwidth to individual passengers via Wi-Fi.
• That still leaves a lot of capacity for each plane. Right now in-flight connectivity services like Gogo utilize CDMA 3G carriers of 3 MHz in size. That’s a decent data connection for a single laptop or smartphone, but not for hundreds. The new network would use wideband OFDMA technologies similar to the TD-LTE networks Clearwire and Sprint plan to build. Basically, Qualcomm wants to replace the 3G and satellite networks linking airplanes today with 4G networks on steroids.

It sounds like a great idea, but the question as to whether passengers on airplanes want access to such awesome bandwidth – or are at least willing to pay for it. According to USA Today, in-flight Wi-Fi use is increasing gradually, but it’s hardly blowing up. Business travelers are choosing to relax on flights rather than remain in constant contact with their companies. The $10 to $15 cost of a Wi-Fi link for a single leg can also be a turn off.

Still, perceptions could change as more connected entertainment devices like tablets are sold. A business traveler may want to sign out of e-mail, but he might not feel the same about his cloud-based music library or movie connection. And ultra-high-capacity networks like Next-Gen AG could drive in-flight connection costs down considerably due to its massive economies of scale.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user davipt

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Whether the information is simply speculation or not, the details actually make sense when you look at Samsung’s Galaxy S and Galaxy S II smartphones. Both were top sellers for Samsung and have helped the company compete with Apple for the smartphone sales crown. Each was a flagship Android handset combining capable hardware with Samsung’s custom user interface.

According to ETNews, the Galaxy S III will follow suit by using a quad-core processor with radio support for HSPA+ and LTE networks. That makes sense as back in October, it was discovered that Samsung’s newest Exynos chip, the 4412, will support four processing cores. Current top-end devices such as the Galaxy Note, Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 7.7 use the dual-core, Exynos 4210.

The new Galaxy S III will reportedly be just 7 millimeters thick, which is thin, but still thicker than the Galaxy S II “clone” I saw at the Consumer Electronics Show last month: Huawei debuted the Ascent P1 S and I immediately thought it was a Samsung GS II.

I’d expect the Galaxy S III to also use Samsung’s Super AMOLED display technology with resolution at least comparable to, if not better than the 1280 x 720 screen on the Galaxy Nexus handset. That would also imply a large screen-size; I’ll go for 4.5-inches as a best guess.

I was hoping to find out all of the details later this month at the Mobile World Congress event, but Samsung recently said we’d be waiting until sometime in the first half of this year.

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But while the Google founders went on to become dotcom billionaires at the head of one of the Internet’s most powerful companies, Marchiori turned down the offer of a job with them and returned to Italy to work on his own projects.

And today, finally, he unveiled what it is he’s been tinkering away on all this time: a social search engine called Volunia that he claims represents the “third generation of search.”

And what is it? Well, that’s hard to tell.

Not only is the service not yet open to the public — although Volunia promises a hundred thousand users will be let in today — but the hour-long press conference to launch the site was held entirely in Italian, struggled with technical problems and had very little in the way of actual demos to show us what the service really did.

The best visuals were a handful of ropey screenshots that suggested little about what was on offer. Most reports seem to repeat the rhetoric without offering any significant insight into how the site works.

So given the lack of hard information, here’s what we have so far:

Volunia is a search engine that indexes and maps out the web and then ranks it through a mixture of algorithms and the opinions of visitors. Marchiori alluded to the fact that it was intended to be like GPS for the web — but said it does not use semantic technology.

At the same time, Volunia provides a place for social interaction in a sidebar that lets users talk to each other and to the owners of the websites they are visiting; a service that seems to be half chatroom, half SideWiki, the universal commenting engine introduced — and then killed — by Google.

And that, for all of the words, seems to be the heart of it.

It’s a search engine that lets people talk to each other while they surf around the web. Marchiori was keen to stress that he wasn’t trying to take Google on, and intended to simply offer a new way of doing things, but the comparisons will inevitably be made.

I’m not going to pass judgment on the product itself, however, not least for the simple reason that I haven’t seen it in action.

But there are a few conceptual problems I have with the project as it stands.

First, there is the simple question of whether it can live up to its own hype. The approach taken so far leaves it wide open to criticism of over-promising, with Volunia doing some serious PR ahead of the launch, mainly with the Italian press and odd little pre-announcements. Such bluster usually end in disappointment — a perfect reason why you should never launch your startup in the press. Who remembers Cuil, the site that promised to take Google head on but turned into a $33 million turkey?

Second, the idea that social search has not been done is only true if you have a very particular view of what social search is. Google and Yahoo have talked a lot about it over the years — and Google has finally got around to seriously implementing that vision with its awkwardly named Search Plus Your World features. But the reality is that social search is something different today than it was to this previous generation of web companies. Right now, Facebook and Twitter are social search, because they are where people interact.

That doesn’t look much like traditional web search — certainly not the sort of search engine that Marchiori has spent his life building — but it’s hard to tell whether Volunia is a step forward or a move back.

And third, regardless of how good your service is, does it work to compete like this? Google has slugged its way to the top, and seems more likely to be unseated by antitrust investigations than straight rivals like Bing. Facebook, meanwhile, is preparing to fill up its coffers from an IPO that will probably make it unassailable in the social space as we understand it. Once somebody has won a market, is it worth fighting them on their own ground — or is it better to simply try and work out where the next big developments online are going to come from?

The Volunia team, backed by serial entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, may be playing down their attempt to revolutionize the world. Marchiori explicitly told journalists at the press conference “not to expect the moon”.

But evidence suggests they think they can make a significant impact. By my count, judging by the various landing pages, the site appears to be launching in a dozen languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish and Japanese. That means it’s either ambitious or covering as many bases as possible — or both. It is not something that can be dismissed as merely an experiment.

Reaction online seems mixed at best. To me, everything from Volunia so far seems to suggest it’s trying to solve a problem that nobody needs to solve right now. I can’t wait to see it open up and find out whether I’m right or wrong.

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In the first quarter, HTC said it was expecting revenue of between 65 billion and 70 billion Taiwanese dollars or $2.20-2.37 billion, which could amount to as much as a 36 percent drop from the previous quarter. Analysts had expected HTC to generate $89.64 billion or $3.04 billion in revenue this quarter. HTC had previously released unaudited results for the fourth quarter but the forecast raised new concerns for HTC as it looks to regain its momentum.

HTC said the disappointing forecast stemmed from its transition to newer products, which will be previewed at the Mobile World Congress. It called the slow down “temporary.”

“Our weakness in first-quarter guidance also comes from facing competition in the U.S. from iPhone and Samsung,” said Chief Financial Officer Winston Yung said on a conference call. “LTE handsets also didn’t meet our expectations.”

HTC did not provide unit shipments for the fourth quarter — the first time it hasn’t done so — and declined to forecast unit sales for the first quarter. But it hopes to see improving sales as it applies more focus to its line-up. The company has been talking about putting out fewer phones and rallying around more “hero” devices.

“While short term performance may not meet the results as expected, we have gained further experience and advancement in the areas of brand management and product innovation,” CEO Peter Chou said in a statement. “These fundamental strengths and the groundwork we have laid will take us into 2012 with a renewed focus and determination.”

The company rode the wave behind Android and enjoyed a lot of growth along with the rest of the smartphone market. But as Samsung began cranking on Android phones, Apple exploded last quarter with an impressive showing on iPhone sales and low-end Chinese makers ZTE and Huawei came on strong, it has left HTC with less room to stand out.

Now, the company faces an uphill battle as it looks to remain relevant as a top Android manufacturer without some of the vertical advantages enjoyed by Samsung. Om has been talking about this for a while and has laid out the challenge for HTC and other Android makers in a market that is increasingly tough to compete in with Samsung commanding the top end and Chinese manufacturers moving up from the bottom.

HTC will hope that the HTC Ville, a 4.3-inch inch Android 4.0 device, and other upcoming devices can help lead a turnaround. But it’s unclear what will provide the real spark. The HTC Rezound was one of the top Android devices this fall from HTC but it got overshadowed by the Galaxy Nexus from Samsung and the Motorola Razr . Does HTC still have gas in the tank? It could still compete but with Samsung the lead dog on Android and Nokia the likely standard-bearer on Windows Phone, this transition period could take a while.

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Startups and growing companies seeking executives and managers as well as established businesses looking to fill new professional positions need to understand how to use these various recruiting tools, platforms and services effectively.

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Join GigaOM Pro and our sponsor TriNet for a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2012, at 10 a.m. PST. When you register today, you will be automatically entered to win a new iPad 2, courtesy of TriNet.

Now BTJunkie, another of the world’s largest filesharing sites, seems to have bitten the dust.

The site — a torrent search engine which seems to have been based in Europe — has been running for the past seven years, and at one point boasted at least 80 million users. But over the weekend its pages were replaced by a single blue screen marking its lifespan and a simple message:

“This is the end of the line my friends. The decision does not come easy, but we’ve decided to voluntarily shut down. We’ve been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it’s time to move on. It’s been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!”

Although not as well known as some others, BTJunkie was one of the world’s most active torrent search engines, linking to millions of active torrents. That catalog which made it a big deal: in fact, according to data from Compete, it was the 3rd largest site of its kind in 2011.

But unlike Megaupload, which only shut when the police raided the company’s HQ, this closure seems to be proactive on the part of the BTJunkie’s owners. The site was never the target of any direct legal action, but it has been in the crosshairs of entertainment industry for some time: searches for the site are generally blocked by Google, and it became a thorn in the side of the MPAA when a BTJunkie admin was the first to spot that the MPAA was uploading fake torrents back in 2007.

It appears that mounting pressure from recent events has finally broken the resolve of the site’s anonymous owners, with Torrentfreak claiming that one of the site’s owners said the stress and trouble wasn’t worth the effort:

Talking to TorrentFreak, BTjunkie’s founder said that the legal actions against other file-sharing sites such as MegaUpload and The Pirate Bay played an important role in making the difficult decision. Witnessing all the trouble colleagues got into was cause for a lot of worry and stress, and those will now belong to the past.
That said, BTjunkie’s owner still thinks there might be a future for other BitTorrent sites.
“I really do hope so, the war is far from over for sure,” he told TorrentFreak.

That certainly makes this move closer to recent changes by The Pirate Bay, which closed down its .org domain in order to prevent seizure by the American authorities, than a move caused by a direct threat.

In the short term this will certainly be seen as a victory for the content lobby, though in a way it really proves that they don’t necessarily need more legislation to get what they want. But will it make a significant difference to the amount of filesharing in the long term? That seems less straightforward.

It’s unlikely that BTJunkie’s users will simply disappear or stop torrenting: they’ll just move off to other services, or start replacements that take the process back towards square one. But however you spin it, this could be an important moment in the arguments about whether the carrot of better service provision is more effective than the stick of legal threat.

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The company’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos announced the release on the company’s blog with the following words:

“Do you love the indulgence of watching episode after episode of your favorite shows on Netflix? Have you ever wished you could do the same with new shows when they premiere on TV?”

He went on to say:

“Unlike any major TV premiere before it, we are debuting all eight episodes of the first season at the same time today. Conventional TV strategy would be to stretch out the show to keep you coming back every week. We are trying to give our members what they want; Choice and control. If you want to watch one episode a week, you can. If you want to watch the whole season this week, you can do that too.”

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings echoed a similar sentiment when asked about the unusual move during the company’s most recent earnings call:

“Netflix’s brand for TV shows is really about binge viewing. It’s the ability to just get hooked and watch episode after episode. It’s addictive. It’s exciting. It’s different. And our release strategy for original content emphasizes that brand strength, which is to be able to get hooked and pour through those episodes rather than get strung out.”

It’s a remarkable move, and it shows how different Netflix is from the traditional TV world, despite the company’s repeated insistence that it’s just like HBO. Netflix’s subscribers are not used to any schedule, and the company wisely chose not to break with those expectations.

But it’s also a gamble on a different kind of buzz. Traditional TV networks try to generate as much word of mouth excitement as possible within the first few weeks to get enough people hooked on a new show to keep it going. Netflix, on the other hand, can be perfectly happy if the majority of its customers watch something else on the service in the next few weeks, as long as it gets a core fan audience hooked on the show  - at which point they’re going to talk about it, much in the same way you’d recommend a show like Arrested Development or Breaking Bad to a friend who hasn’t seen it.

Finally, the binge viewing approach also tells us something about how Netflix views its online competition. Hastings has long said that he is not interested in catch-up TV, and the fact that Netflix hasn’t been offering current-season TV shows the day after they air on TV has been the biggest difference between it and Hulu.

Of course, Hulu has recently been struggling with broadcaster’s demands to protect the next-day window. Fox shows are now only available to paying Hulu Plus subscribers or viewers who authenticate as Dish subscribers, and other networks may follow suit sooner or later. With Lilyhammer, Netflix seems to tell Hulu: Look, we can get new content too – and we’re not slave to anyone’s schedule.

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As more companies put workloads on Amazon Web Services or other public cloud infrastructure, many pay for more than they need because it’s hard to track how many instances are deployed and compare scenarios that might be cheaper.

Now a raft of companies like Cloudability and UptimeCloud have sprung up to monitor cloud services. Some — like Cloudyn — say they go beyond monitoring to showing users how to provision cloud workloads in the most efficient way possible.

“We’ll tell you how to change your provisioning to achieve your results at the lowest possible cost. We look at your use patterns and we look at the pricing of the vendor and bring you a cloud configuration map showing you how to save more,” said Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner in a phone interview.

The customer — Cloudyn has more than 60 beta testers now — registers its cloud services with the company, which in turn gives them a dashboard showing all their instances, databases, and storage. “Then we monitor the environment and provide web analytics dashboard — the user logs onto our SaaS and the system provides them insights into inefficiencies.”

The system provides a list of possible actions — maybe the company should combine all of its small instances into a specific geography, for example. Or, if the customer is running several instances on the same service, it should consolidate them in one box to get better performance at lower cost, Wagner said.

Cloudyn’s service goes live Monday and will be available free till April 30, 2012. Cloudyn now supports AWS but says it will add Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and GoGrid soon.

Customers can look at their cloud dashboards and get some analytics and notification of usage spikes for free.  After April 30, when they use the service for cloud optimization, predictive analysis and “proactive projection” of cloud scenarios, charges will range from $80 per month to $700 per month depending on the total amount the company spends on cloud services.

The need for such services will grow with cloud workloads, but so will the number of vendors offering them. All of these companies also have to keep an eye on Amazon, which is adding more of its own monitoring and management services as well, although third-party offerings can look at multiple public clouds to provide more of a comparison shopping experience.

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