Web Development Live

SITTING on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Mr. Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Mr. Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

And as he struggles to expand the FON network, Mr. Varsavsky faces particular hurdles now that the Internet’s commercial side has reached a crossroads. Born a few decades ago as an anarchic, digital version of a barn-raising, the wireless Internet is now a battleground between two giant technology consortiums seeking to rein in the Web’s chaotic openness in favor of creating uniform, global access built upon wireless data networks.

The two camps, known as WiMax and L.T.E., for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Mr. Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

Undeterred, Mr. Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

MR. VARSAVSKY has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, Calif., last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

During that 90-minute meeting, Mr. Varsavsky says, the two men discussed why a partnership might make sense.

Apple has sold millions of its Wi-Fi routers to residential customers, and its community of Wi-Fi users who share router access would be an ideal platform for FON. For his part, Mr. Jobs had developed an interest in Wi-Fi sharing because of the expanding number of iPhone users who are often frustrated by locked Wi-Fi access points.

Mr. Varsavsky says he left the meeting with the uncomfortable feeling that Apple might end up as a competitor rather than as a partner. But it wasn’t only because of Mr. Jobs’s legendary stubbornness that the Apple meeting apparently went awry. Mr. Varsavsky’s own substantial ego also came into play something he freely acknowledges when he talks about how he first got into business.

That attitude surfaced in other forums as well. In high school in Argentina during the 1970s, he says, he persuaded classmates to open their own office supply store to compete with a store across the street from their school. He also declared his interest in left-leaning politics, which he said attracted the attention of the Argentine military junta that was purging high schools of dissidents. In the “dirty war” of 1976-83, the government killed thousands it suspected of being leftists.

An officer told the school to expel him, Mr. Varsavsky says, and he left for Brazil. Around the same time, he believes, his cousin was kidnapped and killed by the military. The Varsavsky family fled to the United States, and Mr. Varsavsky earned his undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy at New York University in 1981. He later attended Columbia University, where he received graduate degrees in international affairs and business administration.

MR. VARSAVSKY says start-ups got into his blood during graduate school, when he made his first million in a real estate foray: renovating and reselling lofts in New York.

“I used the most money of my own in a company where I lost it all, and I consider it my business black eye,” he recalls, saying that he also drew a valuable lesson from the misadventure: “I don’t invest on my own. If other people don’t want to back me, it’s a sanity check.”

TO that end, Mr. Varsavsky has become a tireless networker, traveling the world to participate in a continuous parade of technology conferences and cultivating a global retinue of friends and contacts. He has also been active on the philanthropic front, earning kudos from a onetime resident of the White House.

“Martin represents the future of entrepreneurial culture and is helping to transform the way people give,” former President Bill Clinton says. “He has found different ways to use his acute business sense and creativity to improve our world and the lives of others.”

This month, Mr. Varsavsky brought together more than 70 Internet business people and technologists from Europe, Asia, Latin America and the United States for a conclave on his Menorca farm. Some guests represented the more than 20 digital enterprises in which he has a stake; others were “friends of Martin,” a loose-knit group that comprises his informal business network around the world.

The four-day conclave featured several unscripted “tech talks” in which entrepreneurs described problems they faced building their businesses. Participants included Lukasz Wejchert, the chief executive of Onet, Poland’s dominant Internet portal.

Deals with companies like Onet will be crucial if Mr. Varsavsky is to make good on his goal of having a million FON customers on each of three continents by 2010. The two companies recently came close to a deal, Mr. Wejchert says, but Onet decided that it was still to early for it to become an Internet service provider in Poland because the regulatory environment worked against new entrants.

That major players like Onet are beginning to find FON a potentially profitable partner is promising, and Mr. Varsavsky’s formidable networking abilities with politicians and entrepreneurs are also a plus. Ultimately, however, FON’s success will hinge on its strategic soundness and operational prowess not on Mr. Varsavsky’s skills at working the cocktail circuit.

He likes to refer to FON as a “revolution,” but so far his crusade has had difficulty gathering momentum because formal corporate alliances have been slow to jell.

In Mr. Varsavsky’s approach, FON’s business is subsidized by non-Foneros passing Web surfers who buy time for access to the network which he can then share with FON’s customers. The approach is different from that of Boingo, a Wi-Fi aggregator based in Los Angeles that charges users a monthly fee for using hotspots while they are traveling.

Yet both FON and Boingo have faced significant resistance from Internet service providers that carefully restrict access to their customers, leaving the idea of a seamless wireless Internet based on Wi-Fi technology an unfulfilled dream so far.

Mr. Varsavsky said he initially hoped that selling $30 Wi-Fi routers embedded with FON software would be all he needed to expand the ranks of Foneros around the globe. But this approach failed to gain traction fast enough, and he shifted gears. Now he is trying to steadily stack up distribution deals with I.S.P.’s.

While some I.S.P.’s have ignored his company, Mr. Varsavsky says FON has gained ground among I.S.P.’s that are looking for a way to attract new customers in competitive markets as well as to compete with high-speed wireless cellular networks.

FON now has a growing range of alliances, including ones with the BT Group, Neuf Cegetel in France, Livedoor, and Time Warner in the United States, as well as a recent agreement with the city of Geneva, which is distributing hundreds of FON routers to residents. Now strongest in Britain, France and Japan, FON has recently made progress with new agreements with two major Japanese retailers and a Taiwanese I.S.P. And Mr. Varsavsky said he is close to major agreements in India and Russia.

The first generation of Wi-Fi technology was limited in range, making it impractical for Foneros to share their routers widely. But a new wireless technology, known as 802.16, which should be more widely available to consumers over the next two years, will offer far greater ranges.

This next generation of wireless communication, called WiMax by Intel and others, may allow him to complete his dream in effect making it possible to weave together a wireless digital network in an urban area with nothing more than an army of Foneros willing to let their routers be used as micro cell towers.

In Europe, the Internet landscape looks more promising. The European Commission’s decision last summer to place a price cap on voice calls to make cellphones more affordable for residents traveling within the European Union didn’t include mobile data. Recent high-speed wireless networks introduced in Europe also use per-megabyte pricing, discouraging the streaming of large files like video.

That leaves a potentially big opportunity for a widely accessible sharing solution for travelers. Yet even in Europe, there are potential roadblocks, not the least of which has been a historically inhospitable atmosphere for entrepreneurial gambits.

“Europe has a larger market than the U.S.A., but it is culturally fragmented and risk-averse,” Mr. Varsavsky says. “But the differences are narrowing, and now there are European venture capitalists and a local entrepreneurial culture.”

Sitting on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The two camps, known as WiMax and LTE, for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

Undeterred, Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

“Our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing a signal,” he says. “We believe WiMax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.”

Varsavsky has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, California, last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

The report, “Broadband Internet Use in Rural Pennsylvania,” examines broadband availability and adoption in four sectors health care, local government, education and business through case studies, interviews with key information-technology personnel and analysis of organizations’ Web sites. While the report focuses on Pennsylvania, their recommendations hold true for any state with a large rural population, according to the researchers.

“Broadband services offer a huge opportunity for rural areas with significant payback in terms of economic development and community revitalization,” said Amy Glasmeier, professor of geography and co-author of the report. “The Internet makes possible a whole range of processes which involve more than rapid access to information and which range from joint projects by municipalities and collaborations between schools to development of new business processes.”

According to the researchers, while the number of rural users of broadband Internet services has been steadily increasing, access to broadband is not universal in rural areas, and in some places, dial-up remains the only affordable option. While dial-up allows for electronic access to information, its slower speed and lower bandwidth capacity limit organizations from developing Internet-enabled processes and collaborations what the researchers distinguish as “transformative” uses.

For instance, with broadband Internet, rural hospitals could improve patient care by forging networks with urban hospitals to access their expertise and resources. Rural hospitals also could develop interactive processes such as online appointment scheduling, remote patient monitoring through biosignals and image data and videoconferencing between patients and doctors.

“Policy must consider ways to facilitate broadband deployment to do more than the status quo only slightly faster or with less face-to-face contact,” Glasmeier said.

But policy makers also need to recognize that there is no single solution to the challenges of broadband utilization. Programs need to be specific to their sectors and linked to the specific challenges facing individual sectors, the researchers assert.

Some interactive processes such as streaming of public meetings, tax payments, conversation forums and collaborative software for curriculum development which broadband Internet can facilitate for local governments and school districts are less relevant for businesses and hospitals, for instance.

The report’s co-authors are Chris Benner, associate professor at University of California-Davis; Chandrani Ohdedar, Ph.D. student, Penn State department of geography; and Lee Carpenter of the Penn State Children, Youth and Families Consortium.

Is South Korea a graveyard for overseas Internet companies? American Internet heavies such as Google, YouTube and MySpace, leaders of the so-called “web 2.0″ frenzy, face heavy odds in South Korea. Why is it that these companies boast astronomical numbers of subscribers and users in many other markets around the Web Development Tutorial world but find little luck here?

MySpace, the world’s largest online social network, launched a Korean service last week, but local portal and blog users have given the new service the cold shoulder. “I signed up out of curiosity, but I canceled my membership soon after because I found it un-user friendly,” a Korean blogger reported. Another blogger said, “MySpace isn’t new or interesting for Korean users who are already familiar with online communities like Cyworld.”

Google and YouTube are also having a hard time here. Since it launched its Korean-language service in 2006, Google, the Web Development Tutorial world’s top Internet search engine, has earned a mere 2 percent-range share of the local Internet portal market. YouTube launched a Korean-language service in January. But while the world’s largest video sharing website boasts about 30 million visitors per month in the U.S., in Korea it has only about one-tenth the number of users as PandoraTV, South Korea’s No. 1 video sharing website.

Experts say the foreign challengers have failed to understand the peculiarities of the South Korean market. Their quality suffers in comparison to local offerings in terms of Korean-language features, site design and sophistication of services, South Korean experts argue.

In addition, South Korean Internet users generally tend to be uninterested in services from abroad. AFP reported recently, “South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries, with some 70 percent of homes having high-speed Internet access. But it has largely shunned popular overseas services.”

Since 2004, there has been no notable change in the rankings of the local portal market, where Naver tops the list. Cho Il-sang, CEO of MetriX, an online survey agency, said, “Overseas web service providers should be more sincere in approaching the Korean market, so that their participation in the Web Development Tutorial market can give a wholesome impetus to the development of the Korean Internet industry.”

Dressed in jeans and sneakers, Owen Thor Walker, 18, of Whitianga, looked young and scared when he appeared in Thames District Court yesterday to face six charges.
The FBI accused Walker, known online as Akill, of being the ringleader of a group of international programmers that set up a botnet - a network of hacked computers controlled by a single computer on the Internet.
FBI spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said its cyber division had a partnership with New Zealand authorities and had kept an eye on international prosecutions.
Cyber crime is third on the list of priority for the head of FBI, behind counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence.
FBI director Robert Mueller said botnets were the weapon of choice of cyber criminals.
Walker - who has no formal computer training - pleaded guilty to two charges of accessing a computer for dishonest purpose, damaging or interfering with computer systems, possessing software for committing crime, and two charges of accessing computer systems without authorisation. All charges were laid under computer provisions of the Crimes Act.
Though some of the charges carry sentences of up to five years imprisonment, Judge Arthur Tompkins indicated he was not considering jailing Walker, who has Aspergers syndrome - a form of autism.
He was reportedly bullied at school and left in Year 9 to study by correspondence. He started experimenting with bot programmes and created his own code, continually developing, redesigning and adding to it.
International cyber crime investigators considered Walkers to be among the most advanced bot programming they had seen, the prosecution summary says.
His bot code contained a number of special features that protected it from discovery, allowing it to spread automatically and identify and destroy rival bot code.
One feature automatically disabled any anti-virus software on an infected computer and prevented the software from being updated.
Walker, also identified online as Snow Whyte and Snow Walker, set up the command and control of his botnet using computer servers outside New Zealand, mainly in Malaysia. He either leased server space or accessed servers illegally.
Prosecutors say the exact number of computers affected by his bot code may never be known, but it was tens of thousands.
Dutch authorities established that Walker was responsible for 1.3million illegal installations of adware - software which an Internet user unwittingly downloads that causes disruptive and unwanted advertising to appear in various programs.
His total income from this activity has been assessed at $36,174.65.
A statement read in court said Walkers parents knew he was making money from the Internet from their home in Whitianga. He had told them he was contracted to do computer programming and they didnt realise he was engaged in illegal activity.
It is believed Walker received 40 cents for every computer infected.
He was arrested in November after an 18-month investigation by New Zealand police, in collaboration with the FBI, secret service and Dutch authorities.
In bailing him to May 28 for reports, Judge Tompkins said the pre-sentence report would cover home detention, community detention, community work and a fine. He said he would not specify the sentencing outcome.
DEFINITIONS
*Adware: Software that causes disruptive and unwanted advertising to appear on users computer screen. Often downloaded unwittingly when user clicks on advert, downloads program or opens attachment.
* Bot: Malicious software with ability to log keystrokes and capture data %26ndash; for example copying bank account passwords %26ndash; or relay spam.
*Botnet: Collection of computers, also known as zombies or robots, that can be controlled remotely through bots by a bot-herder.
*Spam: Unsolicited or junk e-mail, often sent out in massive quantities and through zombie computers. E-mail users without anti- spam protection can find their inbox choked with unwanted adverts.
A spammer who has command and control over a botnet can send messages from thousands of computers.

Classic Peking Opera items will be added to the music curriculum in 200 schools across 10 provinces in China to promote traditional culture among its younger generation, the Beijing News said on Monday.
The aim of this programme is to help the children to develop an interest in the nations unique cultural treasures, the paper quoted Wang Jun, a culture official in Beijings education bureau, as saying.
In media commentaries, people questioned how music teachers, themselves untrained in Peking Opera, would educate students in the complex gestures and trilling vocals that characterise the art.
Only 27 per cent of some 21,000 respondents to an opinion poll carried by popular web portal Sina.com, believed the course would help promote traditional Chinese culture.
If the students are forced to learn, it might backfire and make them totally lose interest, said a post by an Internet user who called himself Little Monkey.
Chinas education ministry has been criticised for other attempts to give students a broader scope of learning.
A plan to introduce compulsory dance classes aimed at improving primary and high school childrens social skills and fitness, drew fire from some parents concerned the waltz and other ballroom steps might foster puppy love between their children and dance partners.

Dubbed digital housekeeping, the online clean-up is one of the issues trend-spotters say will emerge in 2008 as the public wakes up to the potential dangers of social sites, blogs and online reviews.
American company Reputation Defender is spearheading the trend and has five Kiwi customers on its books. Director Michael Fertik says four of them are paying the company US$9.95 a month to undertake detailed internet searches hunting for inappropriate, hurtful or inaccurate information and negotiating its removal if required.
Fertik says customers mainly use the service to ensure they impress employers who routinely check social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace before going ahead with job interviews. But many clients are also concerned about potential dates digging up dirt that could damage a blossoming relationship.
In New Zealand, recruitment agencies are running online background searches.
Its becoming incredibly common, says Julie Cressey, organisational development manager for Madison Recruitment. Facebook is one of the common sites her agency checks, using it to see who potential employees network with.
Cressey says expressing your personality online is fine but the red flag comes out for those posting inappropriate photos or making outlandish commentary.
New Zealand-based public speaker and author of Reputation Branding Hannah Samuel says people need to be educated about the long-term effects of internet content especially young people and their parents, who are often blissfully unaware of the real consequences of the virtual world.
Internet users can at least control what sites they join and what they post about themselves.
Samuels checklist includes asking how parents, employers or a potential life partner would feel about the material and: would I cringe in embarrassment or be ashamed if it appeared again?
But once material is online, removing it becomes difficult.
Nothing is secret and whatever you put out there can stay out there forever, says Eaden McKee, director of web development company Webforce.
Fertik says Reputation Defender staff have a broad suite of solutions available, from asking for content to be removed to legal action.
And internet users are taking the initiative themselves, in some cases voluntarily shutting down their online profiles. In what has been dubbed Facebook suicides, some Facebook users leave notes or give their friends one final poke before leaving their profiles behind. The Facebook Mass Suicide Club website says: Fed up with Facebook? Dont like having your info shared with the world? … Have you ever thought about just deleting your account and freeing yourself? If Facebook is controlling and consuming your life then this is a group for you.
McKee says individuals or businesses can use Google Alerts to notify them when any relevant material is posted.
But experts agree the best protection is not posting inappropriate pictures or comments in the first place.

Jackson and his friends were increasingly shunning broadcast TV in favour of other mediums like the internet, so when he was looking for his next project, Rogow knew he had to do something different.

The result is Afterworld, the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously.

And in keeping with the demands of the YouTube generation, each of the 130 episodes is just over two minutes long.

Afterworld - an animated sci-fi series about life on earth after an inexplicable global event renders technology useless and

99 per cent of the population missing - premiered last night on the Sci Fi channel on Foxtel, but it’s also available on the

mobile phone on Telstra’s Next G network and on the internet through the Sci Fi channel’s MySpace page.

Rogow, who was the executive producer of the popular Lizzie McGuire series, said his production company, Electric Farm

Entertainment, was also developing a game based around Afterworld which he planned to launch by early next year.

Brent Friedman, who wrote Afterworld, joined Electric Farm after spending several years at the game maker Electronic Arts,

where he worked on classic titles like Command %26 Conquer and Mortal Kombat II.

“I think this is where it %26#91;the TV industry%26#93; is heading, and I also think that at the end of the day it will not necessarily be

the end of network television, but I think it’s going to be a different form of network television that will offer the

experience on multiple platforms,” Rogow said.

Figures from TV ratings group OzTAM show TV viewing audiences have fallen by almost 6 per cent in the past five years, and that drop increases to 17 per cent among 16 to 39-year-olds.

By contrast, research firm Roy Morgan said time spent online by 14 to 25-year-old “heavy internet users” doubled from 18 per cent in 2002 to 36 per cent in 2007.

Ian Moate, a project manager at the Sci Fi channel, said changing consumer viewing habits were the primary driver behind the channel experimenting with new distribution mediums, such as MySpace and mobile phones, for Afterworld.

“From our perspective the industry’s changing so much at the moment, so everyone’s trying new avenues and new areas and we’re definitely in that territory as well,” said Moate.

Rogow said he published the first 10 episodes of Afterworld on YouTube “just to see how people responded”, and was blown away by the response.

But unlike most of the short clips on YouTube, millions of dollars have been spent on creating Afterworld. Rogow said it was a major challenge crafting a cohesive narrative for each episode while keeping their length below three minutes.

“These episodes are very very dense and there’s a lot of information in them, and so it’s not just three minutes of ‘name your favourite television show’,” he said.

Rogow said the next generation of TV viewers were losing interest in half and one-hour dramas, which is why he repeatedly passed on the opportunity to develop Afterworld into a live-action TV show and a full-length motion picture.

“I saw my son watching a chunk of CSI today on YouTube … but I must tell you if I said to him what day of the week is CSI on, he couldn’t tell me,” Rogow said.

“I think that’s a statement in and of itself because I think it’s about people wanting to have control over when they watch and what they watch.”

The Sci Fi channel, in addition to broadcasting a new episode every weeknight at 7.30pm for the next 26 weeks, will show half-hour catch-up episodes every fortnight from August 22. Exclusive web-only bonus content will be published on the channel’s website.

“This is a totally new frontier … I think in some ways we’re a year or so ahead of most people in terms of the approach of the material, and by the time they see this we’ll already be working on the next iteration,” Rogow said.

Rogow said he published the first 10 episodes of Afterworld on YouTube “just to see how people responded”, and was blown away by the response.

But unlike most of the short clips on YouTube, millions of dollars have been spent on creating Afterworld. Rogow said it was a major challenge crafting a cohesive narrative for each episode while keeping their length below three minutes.

“These episodes are very very dense and there’s a lot of information in them, and so it’s not just three minutes of ‘name your favourite television show’,” he said.

Rogow said the next generation of TV viewers were losing interest in half and one-hour dramas, which is why he repeatedly passed on the opportunity to develop Afterworld into a live-action TV show and a full-length motion picture.

“I saw my son watching a chunk of CSI today on YouTube … but I must tell you if I said to him what day of the week is CSI on, he couldn’t tell me,” Rogow said.

“I think that’s a statement in and of itself because I think it’s about people wanting to have control over when they watch and what they watch.”

The Sci Fi channel, in addition to broadcasting a new episode every weeknight at 7.30pm for the next 26 weeks, will show half-hour catch-up episodes every fortnight from August 22. Exclusive web-only bonus content will be published on the channel’s website.

“This is a totally new frontier … I think in some ways we’re a year or so ahead of most people in terms of the approach of the material, and by the time they see this we’ll already be working on the next iteration,” Rogow said.

Microsoft and Facebook said the $US240 million investment valued Facebook

at $US15 billion, which analysts said was a steep price and a bet

the young company would be able to transform itself into a hub for

all sorts of Web activity.

“The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users’

operating system on the Internet %26#150; everyone logs into Facebook every

day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future

applications that will be developed for it,” said Morningstar analyst

Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends and colleagues share information

among themselves, already has allowed developers to create games and

other applications specifically for its site, whose popularity makes

it extremely valuable to advertising sellers such as Microsoft and

Google.

Some 250,000 new users register on Facebook each day, Microsoft and

Facebook said.

Microsoft said it would be the exclusive third-party advertising platform

for Facebook, which has more than 49 million Internet users. That

extends a previous deal into Facebook sites outside the United States.

Google and Microsoft, now rivals for Internet-based audiences and applications,

each expressed interest in a minority stake in Facebook for its growing

user base and advertising potential.

The rivals have butted heads before for Internet properties. Google

beat Microsoft with a $US1.65 billion acquisition of online video

sharing site YouTube last year.

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said that Microsoft was a better

strategic fit for Facebook, since it knew how to work with software

developers and build computing environments %26#150; such as its Windows

operating system.

“Microsoft is a company that knows how to build platforms, knows how

to develop relationships with developers.

Microsoft developed the

network that is the biggest, most vibrant one out there,” she said.

“Frankly, Google didn’t bring as much to the deal.”

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin told a meeting with Wall Street analysts

at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters that his company could

partner with important Web sites.

“We don’t feel, at a higher level, that we need to own every successful

company on the Internet,” he said.

Shares of Microsoft rose slightly to $US31.47 from a Nasdaq close of

$US31.25, while Google ticked down to $US675 from a close of $US675.82.

The US-based body that oversees the World Wide Web’s structure, ICANN, says the name is out of date and wants to kill it off. But thousands of Internet users still use the suffix %26#150; in part for its nostalgia value %26#150; and are fighting to save it. Though nearly 16 years have passed since the end of the Soviet Union, .su is increasingly popular with businesses, clubs and political groups and Russian lobbyists said they had started negotiations with ICANN to keep it. “We want to try and save it,” Alexei Platonov, director of the independent Russian Institute of Public Networks, which promotes technology use, said at a news briefing. “First there is the community and secondly there is also the history of the domain name. . . It’s original and offers Web site names that other domains don’t have any more,” Platonov said. The .su domain name was assigned to the Soviet Union as its country code on September 19, 1990 at the start of the internet revolution. The Soviet Union ceased to exist 15 months later. The .ru domain assigned to Russia after the Soviet Union fell apart is by far the most popular domain name for Russians but people continue to register the .su the domain name. Figures released by the .su lobbyists show there are nearly 10,000 registered Web sites with the domain name and around 1,500 new ones have been added this year. ICANN, or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, say it is tackling the .su name as part of its drive to clean the internet of seemingly outdated domain names. Countries’ domain names are designated according to an international list called ISO 3166-1 which holds two letter codes for every nation. As the Soviet Union is no longer on the list, the .su domain should be scrapped just as .cs died after Czechoslovakia split into the Czech republic and Slovakia in 1993, ICANN has said. After Zaire changed its name in 1997 to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the .zr domain name was also scrapped. “In 1992 it (.su) was taken off the ISO list and since that day it has been at odds with the ISO standard,” Kim Davies from ICANN said earlier this year. “Our primary aim is to maintain the stability of the internet.” Russian .su lobbyists, who are independent from the government, pointed out though that other two letter country domain names not on the ISO 3166-1 list are being used. These include Britain’s .uk for the United Kingdom which gained prominence over the list’s .gb for Great Britain. But the Russian campaigners say there is no danger of an Internet Cold War breaking out over the issue. “I have to stress relations are friendly,” said Alexei Soldatov, head of the Fund for the Development of the Internet, a Russian non-governmental group.